Why a Messiah?

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. That's somebody that you love, somebody that you care about, some family member, maybe it's a mom or a dad, maybe it's grandmother or grandfather, uncle, aunt, whatever the case may be. And they give, and this is especially challenging, if they happen to be in the room, right? If they're in the room and you open this gift and you're like, oh, this is for me, great, thanks. And you open the gift and it's like, what is this thing? Like, what am I, this is like ridiculous. I mean, why are you giving me copy paper?

Whatever the case may be. And, or they give you something that you're like, I don't even know what this is for. That happened one particular time I remember that my mother gave me a gift.

My mother was a major gift giver, gave a lot of gifts. And this one particular Christmas, I opened the gift up and it's kind of a little bit like a microphone. It's got what looks like a long cylindrical thing. And on the bottom of the long cylindrical thing, there's these three metal legs. And at the bottom of each metal leg, there's a little circular thing that would kind of remind you of like a mixing apparatus that you would use in the kitchen. And I'm like, uh, I know this is one where she wasn't there.

They were at one of my other siblings houses for Christmas. And I'm like, what is this thing? And then there's an on off button. So I press the button on the top of the device and it just starts kind of shaking and vibrating and you set it down on the table and it starts to turn in a clockwise direction. Well, what it was, was an automatic stirrer, right? So if you have something on the stove and it needs, it's being simmered and you need something like it's a tomato soup or something, or pasta sauce, and you just need it to be continually stirred.

You're supposed to drop the automatic stir in the pan and then you turn it on and it just automatically stirs that. So you can go watch Netflix or whatever. It was very bizarre. It wouldn't work well. And I was like, I didn't really know I needed one of these, right?

So have you ever gotten a gift like that? Today, we're going to take a strange bounce off of my strange memory to talk on Theology Thursday about the Messiah. What does that have to do one with the other? Well, you might ask the question, what is a Messiah anyway? And do we need one? Like, why do we need one? So it's like the Christmas gift.

If you don't quite know what it is, you don't know what to do with it. What's the deal with the Messiah? So it's always good to have our good friend Dr. Sam Horn back in the house, BJU Seminary here on Theology Thursday. Sam, great to see you. Merry Christmas. Welcome back. Good to see you. Thanks, Steve. Merry Christmas to you and to all the listeners. It's always a joy to be on the program with you. And I always get a kick about how you introduce the program. And I was kind of laughing at your story because I have a very similar story.

That's going to be pretty embarrassing. My kids took me out for my birthday this year. And normally my kids, you know, they'll give me socks or a tie, very predictable in the kind of gifts they give. But this year when we got to the restaurant, they had this long box.

It was thin, maybe about an inch high and three inches wide and almost a foot long. And I'm like, man, this this is interesting. And I was kind of, so the all meal they were telling me about, you know, can't wait for you to get your gift kind of thing. So finally got time to open the gift and I opened it up and there was this long metal thing with a hook on the end of it and a handle. And I didn't know what it was. It was actually a poker. A fireplace poker. But it was out of context.

And so I'm just looking at this thing and I looked up at my kids and I said, what is this? And they said, dad, it's a poker. And I said, so why in the world would you give me a poker?

I mean, I wasn't thinking. I mean, we got a big laugh out of it later. It's like, why would you give me a poker?

And they said, well, dad, you just you just had a new fire pit built in the backyard and you're going to need the poker. And it was like, oh, there you go. And so I got thinking about this as I was preparing for our advent series at Palmetto Baptist. And everybody knows who the Messiah is. Typically at Christmas, we we open our Bibles and we have messages on who is on who Jesus is.

But this year I read through the Christmas story, as we always do, Luke chapter two. And it struck me that here is this angelic being who shows up and he stands next to these shepherds in a field outside of Bethlehem. And he says, God has sent a gift to the world.

And the gift that he has sent to the world is a Messiah. And then there's a whole heavenly army that is present. The word there is a host, the heavenly host.

And the word host means army. There's an army of angelic beings that fills up that field. They're all standing around and they're they're they're articulating immense praise to God for the coming, the arrival of this gift that God has given to the world, the Messiah. So I thought to myself, what exactly is a Messiah? If I were the shepherds, I've been thinking about a Messiah for a long time. But what exactly is a Messiah?

And more importantly, why do we need whatever that is? Right. Well, it's a great sort of led into the story of the poker. It's a great series of questions, and especially back then.

And we'll get into this because one of the interesting things in today's blog post that Sam was kind enough to write for us, what is a Messiah and why do we need one? I just put that link up on Facebook Live so you can jump over there if you want to get a direct link to it. You can always go to the website. It's a super easy website, seminary.BJU.EDU backslash radio.

It's all you need to do. You can get to every one of these that these our friends down at BJU Seminary are kind enough to write for us. It's that guide for the conversation every week. So you're not just limited to what we talk about during the show.

You can kind of dig in on yourself. What is a Messiah and why do we need one? Just go to seminary.BJU.EDU backslash radio and you can look at all of those. But the interesting thing about it that you're going to fold in here is like John the Baptist, John the Baptist. OK, he and Jesus meet in utero, right?

Essentially. And you got Elizabeth in there and then John the Baptist. There's Jesus.

And while we have that big baptism moment, incredible. But later on in John's captivity and then he's asking questions, wondering if this Jesus, the same guy he baptized, is actually the Messiah. And so we have to understand what is the Messiah?

Why do we need one? And that's a big question that I think, again, in the Advent season, it's good to kind of plow back into this. I think we just kind of assume our theological knowledge and expertise of this stuff at Christmas time, Sam.

But I don't know how deep we actually think about it. Yeah. And I think that was John's issue, right? I mean, he had a set of expectations about what Messiah was going to do.

And if we're honest, we have those same expectations. Yeah. Right. When we embrace Jesus as our Savior. Great point. When we decide he is the Messiah, we're going to follow him.

We anticipate certain things. Right. And that was John. Yeah. I mean, he knew Jesus. What's the deal?

Yeah. And especially for those guys, the shepherds in the field. Well, Messiah. Well, OK, where's the blingy chariot that's going to bring the king of Israel in? Oh, you're going to find him in a manger. What? I don't know that this is exactly what I asked for.

We'll pick it up there when we come back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BGU Seminary today with our good friend Dr. Sam Horn revisiting, as we have been recently and next Thursday as well, did a recorded show about the incarnation God taking on the form of a man. That's Christ. That's an incredible conversation. Did that interview about, wow, three weeks ago, which was awesome. It was real.

I mean, I was I was really just kind of I felt more like an audience member than the host in that one because it was just an amazing conversation. So that's going to play next Thursday. I won't be live next Thursday and Friday.

I'll be alive, but I won't be live, God willing. So that's next week. But today, really looking at what is a Messiah in the first place and why do we need one? And we're talking to Dr. Sam Horn again. And I know we wanted to jump to this is such an interesting little passage that we find in Luke seven when John, John, who knew who Jesus was, baptized him personally, saw all this stuff happening.

Then John in Luke seven, verse 19, says, Are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? That's like I've known somebody for years. I grew up with them. And hey, are you are you the radio show guy or is there like somebody else? I'm like, dude, you know me.

Like, why are you asking this question? It's really an interesting passage. Well, as we were talking about before, I think that's a question that Luke sets up right in the middle of the book, because by the time we get there, we have the same question if we've been thinking.

So maybe we should jump back to really the question that Luke sets up, and that is what exactly is a Messiah? We talked about these angels that showed up with the angel in the field. Man, these are majestic beings.

I mean, radiating with light. You see them in the Old Testament. And here they are filling up a whole field. And they're an army.

The word host. There's an army that takes you all the way back to this war that God has initiated with his enemy, Satan. And this is the battle of the ages, right?

He's initiating the battle of the ages. And he's saying, I'm giving a gift to the world. And the gift is a Messiah.

And that term would have been loaded. He describes it in Luke to this way for under you is born this day in this day in the city of David, a savior who is Messiah, the Lord. And so we know who he is. He's Jesus. But the word savior, we import all of our post New Testament theology to it. He's going to save us on the cross.

But the shepherds would have had a real basic idea of what the word savior meant. It was a champion who delivered. Think of David in the Old Testament. The ultimate David.

Yeah. Who was who was a champion, right? He goes out against the enemies of God. And that's what a savior is.

He's a deliverer. And and there were three things that would be true about this champion that all the shepherds would have known. Number one, he was anointed, appointed rather by God. And Luke says this in Luke chapter two, when Simeon the priest blesses Mary and Joseph for bringing little Jesus, he says to them, this child is appointed for the fall and the rising of many in Israel and for a sign that is opposed. And so he's appointed by God the father to a mission. He is anointed by God, the spirit.

So you're going to see all members of the Trinity are involved in this. The father appoints him. The spirit anoints him. Isaiah 11 talked about the spirit of the Lord resting on this individual. And that spirit would be wisdom and understanding counsel and might.

His name shall be wonderful counselor. So all of those texts tie in. But in Luke chapter three, when Jesus was baptized, Luke says the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form. And right after that, Jesus goes into the synagogue in Nazareth and he opens the scroll of Isaiah and he says, the spirit of the Lord is on me. So he's appointed by the father, anointed by the spirit, and he's acknowledged as God's own son. In Luke chapter one, the angel says to Zachariah, his name will be called the son of the most high. And then Mary is told he will be called the son of God. And in Matthew 27, the centurion at the end of his life looks up at the body of Jesus and says, this one surely was the son of God. So whoever this champion is, he's appointed, anointed and acknowledged as the son of God, appointed by the father, anointed by the son and acknowledged by all to be the son of God. And this champion has a mission. And the mission is to bring Shalom to the earth.

If you look at the angel cry in verse 14, glory to God in the highest and on earth, Shalom. The last time you saw Shalom on earth was Genesis two. Right. Yeah.

Right. And then Shalom got broken. Because just so everybody understands, when you hear Shalom, we translate peace.

Correct. But to us, oftentimes, and I'm getting into some Christian ethics here, but oftentimes we think of peace as the sometimes just the absence of war, the absence of conflict or peace where things are generally OK. Shalom is way beyond that. Shalom is like, I'm wishing upon you prosperity and incredible, pretty much every adjective about every aspect of your life. It really is a heavenly in the garden environment.

Correct. That's all the things we were created to long for. Oh, man, are wrapped up in Shalom. So when a Jew says Shalom to you, it's huge, it's huge, it's huge. And so here is God the father sending a message through the angel saying, I have given you a gift and the gift I've given the world is the Messiah. And he's going to bring Shalom and he's going to do it by doing three things. He's going to reverse an ancient curse. He's going to redeem an ancient people and he's going to remove and vanquish an ancient enemy. When you go back to Genesis three fifteen, that's exactly what what Messiah is going to do. Here's the champion. And by the time he's done, he's going to reverse an ancient curse.

He's going to redeem an ancient people and he's going to remove and vanquish an ancient enemy. OK. All right. Let me jump in here right quick, because now I'm now I'm you asked this question. We asked this question in the last segment is, OK, when you talk about Jesus as a Messiah, I have a savior, I have a Messiah, I have a king, I have a Lord.

Then the question becomes for a lot of us with them. I mentioned that before. What's in it for me? OK, what's this going to look like? What kind of impact would you describing Jesus the way you just did, Sam? And we're talking to Dr. Sam Horn from B.J.U.

Seminary. I'm thinking like this sounds like Avengers Endgame. And all of a sudden you got Thor, you got Captain America. Then they bring all these people back from the dead and now they're going to take on the ultimate evil and establish the ultimate peace. And so my vision and I think this is where we're going to go. John the Baptist, his vision is somewhat like that. So we're going to get the Avengers Endgame here with the Messiah, who's going to kick Rome's butt, who's been our butt for a long time.

This is going to be awesome. And look how it starts. And there's myriads and myriads of angels.

And then you get this poor guy from Nazareth who's a carpet, who's a carpenter who dies on a cross. To go to your what's in it for me question, the answer is ultimately everything. But to get to the everything, I got to have a lot of nothing. Right.

And that's that's an essence. So so he's got this mission to redeem and restore a fallen people to the image of God's son so they can rule and reign on a kingdom he's going to establish on earth and righteousness. That's a huge, huge mission.

That's a huge, huge mission. And and when we come back from the break, we'll we'll dive back to Luke Chapter seven when John's asking, are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? You're not exactly Captain America here, cuz.

You're more like, I don't know, just some schlep and a robe that builds things. We're going to we're going to unpack that with Dr. Sam Horn when we come back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary.

Dr. Sam Horn back in the house as we consider what is a Messiah and why do we need one? All right, here's the deal. Let's just kind of build our own. We're going to use that. We're going to be the clay creating the potter.

So we're going to build our own. So here's what I want, Sam. When it comes to a Messiah and a king, I want him to fulfill my anticipations.

I want him to satisfy my longings and I want him to meet my expectations. Is there anything wrong with that? Well, if you stop thinking about it, there's everything wrong with that, right? Because it puts you on the throne.

It puts you in the driver's seat. It's the kingdom of me instead of the Lord's kingdom. And Jesus never came to build my kingdom. He came to establish a kingdom that his father promised to give him. And he promised to let me rule and reign with him. But it's his kingdom.

And so that's the whole problem, right? So here, Jesus shows up and there are all these anticipations about a first century Messiah. You know, for years, we've been waiting for somebody to take care of Rome.

We've been waiting for somebody to fulfill all those promises, the promises of the prophets kept telling us about, about our kingdom, nation being the kingdom that's going to rule all the kingdoms. And John looks on the riverbank one day, 30 years after Jesus was born and says, that's him. That is God's lamb. That one is going to take away the sins of the world.

But he didn't know what he was saying. And so as Jesus starts rolling around, we get to see some amazing stuff, right? We see baptism. Holy spirit comes down, goes out in the wilderness, goes up against Satan, defeat Satan, just with words, right?

He has this amazing teaching. He like shames the Pharisees. I mean, it's just everywhere you go, Jesus is doing amazing stuff. He even raises a dead woman's son, a widow's son coming out of name, which by the way, the only other time you see that in new test or in the old Testament is Elijah. And John is supposed to be the new Testament counterpart to Elijah.

So there are these little clues that Luke gives you. And then you find out John is in prison and he's in Herod's prison. Herod's a little tiny King that Rome set up.

He's not even ruling in his own right. And he's got the Northern part of Israel, a Galilee of the Gentiles. And he's got some building projects going up there. And John has been preaching and Herod gets ticked and arrests him and puts him in prison. And it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out what's about to happen. Because this is not going to go good for John and we know how it ends. So here's John, he knows that his cousin has come. He knows what the angels have said.

He knows what happened because of the stories his mother and his aunt told him. And he is convinced that he's the Messiah, but Jesus doesn't seem to be remotely interested in deposing this little puppet King. And he doesn't seem to be at all burden to release John from his troubles. And so John's going, what kind of a Messiah is this? And he sends two people to Jesus to say to him, are you really the one we should be looking for?

Or should we look for another? And when you put it in that context and you let Luke get you there, you begin to realize that's exactly what happens to us. I mean, think about how many times we have expectations. We expect Jesus to fix our marriage. Hey, I became a Christian, now fix my marriage. We expect Jesus to fix our family. We expect Jesus to fix our kids. We expect Jesus to provide our needs, to heal our diseases. And then we find out he's not really doing that.

At least not now. And then somebody comes along and starts preaching a message. Hey, you've got the wrong Jesus. The Jesus I want to sell you offers you prosperity. The Jesus I want to sell you offers you health. And if you'll just give a certain amount of money and have a certain amount of faith or take this certain step, then I promise you the Jesus I'm peddling will heal you. Or the Jesus I'm talking about will give you wealth. If you sow seed of five bucks or whatever, I mean, just think about how, I mean, even on television, on radio, on print, how many different Jesuses are peddled that are designed to meet our expectations. Or Satan will step up to the plate and take you in the complete opposite direction to just deny his very existence. And that's where the problem of evil comes in. If God is all powerful and if he's all good, then why is your life in such a shambles?

I'm like, what's the deal with that? I did a show once years ago, Sam, when I have a friend here in town, I don't see as often as I used to, but we did a back to back shows, atheists, atheist activists, pretty wealthy. And we did one show, Ask the Atheist. So he's my guest. And then we just open up the phone lines and all people call in, just ask the atheist a question.

And he's willing to do it. Really nice guy. Then we reversed. So the atheist guest hosted the Steve Noble Show and I was his guest. And that day it was Ask the Christian Day. So he had a bunch of his atheist friends call in and pepper me with questions.

OK, so one of his one of his callers calls in and goes and he was really you could tell he was agitated from the get go. And he's like, listen, me and my brother were both atheists. My our mom is a really devout Christian. She's always praying for us. So what kind of God after my mom spends her whole life praying for her two sons, what kind of loving God is this that all of a sudden she prays for us? We die. We're not Christians. And so we go burn in hell.

Like what kind of God is that? And that's that's what happens there, that Satan will take you in the opposite direction. He's not giving you what you want. Well, find a different Jesus or maybe the whole thing's bunk. So I'm going to throw it all out.

Either way, Satan's playing in there as well, isn't he? Well, and I think you hit it really correctly when you said he doesn't give you what you want and where Luke is going to go here is this Messiah that God sent to the world isn't going to give you what you want because your wanter is broken. He's going to give you what you need. And what you need is something amazing that you aren't even thinking about. You know, there is a to use our illustration earlier, there is a stove and a pot that go with the mixture that you got.

Right, exactly. There is a huge fire pit that goes with the poker. Well, there's something that goes with this gift. And so John is going, I know what it is.

It's my prison cell. And it's this little crazy king. Right.

That's crazier than a fox. And I know exactly why God sent Messiah. We got to get rid of Herod and then you get me out of here so we can start building this kingdom and get rid of the Romans and get the show on the road. And God is going, no, no, no, no, no. That's what you want. Yeah. But what you need is so much bigger.

Well, now you're starting to sound like Mick Jagger. You can't always get what you want. And then, of course, the punchline of that song is you get what you need. And oftentimes we don't want to deal with what our need because our ultimate need is not comfort. It's not physical healing. It's not financial stability.

It's not relational stability. Ultimately, what every single person that's ever lived needs is salvation. You need and the only way that's going to happen is the Messiah. That's it. And that's exactly where Luke goes.

Right. And I think that's, you know, we see the amazing things that Jesus did and we see the amazing promises and and we immediately want to domesticate them to our own little world. John's little world was a prison cell and his enemy was Herod. My little prison cell might be my boss at work or the cancer that's ripping into my system or my kids that just don't seem to ever want to repent.

Yeah. Or this circumstance that a man and I need Jesus to fix it and he's not. And so if Jesus isn't going to fix it, then I got to fix it and I can't fix it.

So I got to go find someone who can. And that's why my generation, Steven, your generation, we're abandoning the church like nobody's business, because for years we've been fed. If you just do enough church and you just, you know, you dress right, you talk right, you do all the right things, you're going to get this outcome. Jesus owes it to you. He owes it to you.

If you go to church, you know, if you do 52 churches a year for seven years, then he owes you a good marriage. You know, if you do 10 tithes a month for 10 weeks and he owes you this kid getting right with God. Do your penance. Do your penance, say, for our fathers and 10 Hail Marys.

Put enough change in the machine. Ten churches and two tithes, a mission trip and four denies. Yeah, you got to go first.

Right. I'm going to give up this. I'm going to go from four percent to six percent of my tithe. I'm going to I'm going to volunteer at church. And like I have a I remember somebody because the first time that I went on a mission trip, a foreign mission trip to Kenya and I came back all kinds. I left my business behind, a small house painting company, contracting company. And I had a decent amount of employees and everything. But but I had another friend that had a small business and he was like, I don't know, I can't do that.

I can't leave my business behind. And then another is like, OK, well, God took care of my business. So another gentleman I knew is like, maybe if I go on this mission trip, God will fix my business.

And he goes on the mission trip and he shares the gospel and he does this and that and he comes back and his business didn't get fixed. And you're like, what's up with that? I mean, I did this thing. It's an incredible thing.

I led people to the Lord. I come back and my business isn't fixed. That's kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it?

Yeah. And so you come back. I know we're heading to the break, but remember the text in Luke two. He will be a savior, a gift for all the people.

I want it to be for me. Right. God has a much bigger audience. Praise the Lord. Such a good reminder. We're going to keep going when we come back on Theology Thursday. We'll be right back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. It is Theology Thursday as it is each week with our friends at BJU Seminary as well as occasionally Bob Jones University. Our good friend, Dr. Sam Horn, who's with us every month. And that's been a great blessing. Sam, thank you for your investment in not only the show and me, but everybody that listens or watches.

It's always so rich. It's not like I come in here as a passive observer. I come in here and I get fed and I love that. And you guys, not just you, Sam, but everybody there at the seminary and at the university every week.

I'm getting fed. I mean, when I first started the idea of Theology Thursday years ago, when I was a student at Southeastern Baptist, I'm like, well, I know that I'm also I know that I'm hey, hey, come on over. We've got some great food here at the Noble House, but I'm eating it, too.

So part of what drives me on Theology Thursday is, hey, I've got access to all these incredible Christian thinkers and theologians and teachers like Sam. And so I'm going to pull up a table. I'm going to pull up a chair to that table. I'm going to eat and then invite everybody else to come and eat with me. And that's why it's so great. You get to eat, too. It's mutual.

Yeah, it's so wonderful. So I deeply appreciate you being here and always helping us to understand at a deeper level the scriptures that we're talking about and what we're looking at today. Certainly with Christmas season, what is the Messiah and why do we need one? In the blog post today, Sam, I wanted to touch on this real quick and then we'll finish with kind of a crescendo of how what great news it is that we don't have the Messiah that perhaps we want sometimes, but we have the Messiah that we need. But a big part of the blog post, she's talked about Moses. I love looking at Moses because he's a good shadow, but he's not the real thing.

But there's a lot of things in here. So just touch a little bit on Moses and how we look at him as a prophet. And it's kind of a foreshadow of the Messiah because he was good, but he wasn't good enough. So when you unwrap the gift that God sent to the world, you look at the gift and it's a Messiah and you're going, what is it and why do we need it?

And you need it for three reasons. You need a better prophet than Moses. You need a better priest than Aaron. And you need a better king than David.

Wow. I mean, you stop and think about the three greatest people in Israel's history. Moses, the giver of the law, Aaron, the first high priest in the order of Levi, right?

We're going to find out him on Melchizedek, but the main high priest, the origin of the priestly system, and David, the golden king of Israel, and you need a better Moses, a better Aaron, a better David. And God knew that, right? And it's like, so, you know, think about living back in the early 1900s and the first model T comes out. It was stunning. It was, I mean, people's jaws were dropping.

This is amazing. This thing goes 15 miles an hour. It comes in all colors, as long as it's black.

As long as it's black. You know, I mean, and then you get the model A after that. And then, you know, fast forward to where we live today.

And if somebody actually was shopping for a car and you sold them a model T and they weren't like an enthusiast, they'd be going, what? This thing does it. But back then it was awesome. And so when Moses showed up as the premier prophet of Israel, he was awesome. I mean, he saw God face to face. He goes up on a mountain and God gives him a covenant that is filled with grace. This is a gracious covenant.

There are 10 words that are designed to make human life Shalom. Your marriage is going to work better when you don't commit adultery. Your relationships are going to work a lot better when you don't lie. Your friendships with your neighbor are going to go super well if you don't steal or bear false witness, right? You're going to get a lot further in life if you can stop coveting.

I mean, that's just the human side of it, right? So here are 10 wonderful, simple, gracious words that God gives to his people. And Moses brings down his face is glowing because he's been in the presence of God. This guy takes them out into the wilderness.

He's an awesome leader. He takes 2 million people out into the desert and he brings bread down from heaven and he brings water out of a rock. And somehow in the middle of all of this, Aaron, his brother sets up this majestic tent. That's stunning. And God is in that tent.

I mean, the pillar of fire, the smoke, you know, by day. I mean, this is an amazing thing. And here's Aaron at the head of all that. And Aaron's like, I have a way to get you in that tent. You know, we'll kill this animal.

You put your hands on it. You'll confess your sins over it. And you can go in. I have a way to cleanse you of the guilt of your sin. I can take this hyssop and dip it in this blood and in this water and sprinkle you and you're richly purified. I've got a way to ritually purify you. I've got wonderful instruction in the tour of God. And by the way, God told me to bless you.

Remember the Aaronic blessing in numbers, the Lord bless you and keep you and cause his face to smile upon you or shine upon you or shine upon you. There is this amazing priest in Aaron. And then there is this stunning king called David. You know, by the time we get into the land, the people are like, oh, we want a king and we want a tall king and we want a handsome king.

We want a bold and brave king whip up on the Hittites like their king. And Sam is like, no, no, no, no, no, that that's what you want, but that's not what you need. And people are like, no, no, no, that's what we need.

That's what we want. And God says, let him have it. And they get Saul. Have it your way.

Yeah. And then, and then God, God says, I'm going to be gracious. I'm going to take Saul off the scene and I'm going to give you what you need.

I'm going to give you a man after my own heart. And he gives him David. And there is this amazing king who, who has an amazing reign, but in the middle of it, all of those guys reveal they're not the Messiah.

Yeah. Moses struck the rock, right? Aaron led a rebellion and built a golden calf. David committed adultery.

And all of a sudden you're realizing is you unpack the gift. You're looking at a prophet like Moses. You're looking at a priest like Aaron, and you're looking at a king like David.

And they're not enough to reverse an ancient curse, to redeem an ancient people and to remove an ancient enemy. You're going to need somebody better than Moses. Moses says this, this is so interesting to me. After 40 years of leading people in the wilderness, he says to them, you have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in Egypt. You saw everything you did to Pharaoh. You saw everything you did to the land.

You saw the great trials, the signs and the wonders. But to this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. Moses says to them, look, I could do a lot for you, but the one thing you needed, I couldn't do. I couldn't give you a heart to understand. I couldn't give you eyes to see or ears to hear. And then he says, but the Lord God is going to raise up from you a prophet.

Boom. And that prophet will have God's words in his mouth and you will listen to him. And here's John the Baptist who sends these two messengers to Jesus.

And he says, are you the one or should we look for another? And Jesus says, go back and tell John the blind see the deaf here and the dead are raised to life. He's pointing back to this prophecy in Deuteronomy 18. Moses says, I can't give you a, I can't take your dead heart and make it live. I can't take your blind eyes and make him see. I can't take your deaf ears and make him hear, deaf ears and make him hear.

But there's somebody who's coming and he can do that. And when John says, you're not delivering me from Herod and you're not getting me out of this prison cell, what's up with this? Are you the Messiah? Jesus says, now, now, John, hang on a second.

Get your eyes off of the prison cell, look through the bars and go all the way back to Moses. And here's what you need to know. Somebody's here. Who's causing dead people to live. Who's opening blind eyes and helping him to see.

And who's opening up deaf ears. And here's what he has to say to you. And here's the message Jesus has come unto me, all of you who are weary and I will give you rest.

That's what we need. I want freedom. God says, you need rest. You need to stop all of the guilt. You need to stop trying to pay for your own salvation.

You need to stop trying to fix everything that's broken in your life. And you need to come to me and you need to rest because I can give you what you need. And in the process, I'm defeating an ancient enemy. I'm redeeming an ancient people and I'm reversing an ancient curse. And by the time it's all said and done as the priest, after a different order than Aaron, a high priest who understands, I can open up the way to God's throne for you. And as the King, I'm going to establish a kingdom and you're not just going to be servants in that house. You're going to be sons and daughters.

You're going to rule and reign with me. And all of a sudden you begin to realize this gift God sent to the world is stunning. It's so much bigger than get me out of my prison cell and taking care of my little Herod's. That's right. It's about a massive thing God is doing for me, but for all the people, which is why you have a whole host of angels that are there.

Yeah, because it really is that big a deal. And to wrap this up, I was thinking as you are unpacking that, which was really powerful and just beautiful, that you get what you need. But then eventually in heaven, you get that's what you really want.

Yeah. And you get more. You get exceedingly more beyond what you could ask or imagine. You get so much more. What you thought you wanted ends up being like garbage compared to what you get. And so I want this and I want that.

Well, wait till you get to heaven, because you're going to get way more than you ever even thought to want. I used to tell my kids, sometimes God says no to something I think I want so he can say yes to what I really want. Because he understands the longings of the human heart. Such a beautiful, beautiful message. Sam, thank you as always. Dr. Sam Horn, BJU Seminary.

What is a Messiah and why do we need one? If you want to revisit that, share that, share this program today to help people really invest in this Christmas season, that would be a good idea. I got the link up on Facebook Live so you can go check it out there or just go to the website as always with our friends at seminary.bju.edu backslash radio.

And I've got that link up as well. Sam, God bless you, friend. Merry Christmas. Thanks for leading us. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. God willing, I'll talk to you again real soon. And like my dad always used to say, ever forward. Another program powered by the Truth Network.