Messianic foreshadowing in the OT

Well, I have a book in that case that you might be interested in. It is called The Fall Feasts of Israel by Mitch and Zhava Glaser, published by Moody Press in 1987. If you can't find it at your library, I'll be happy to mail it to you. You can send me your address privately. It is a very interesting book.

The Glazers are Jewish Christians.

You reference Rosh Hashanah, or the Feast of Trumpets in one of your posts. Now I've always believed that in order to understand what Jesus meant - to truly understand it, one has to understand the OT, the way it was interpreted by the Jews. The themes of Rosh Hashanah are those of judgement and restoration. It's not wrong to call them a foreshadowing of the return of Christ to claim the church, in that I believe that every story in the Bible is there for a distinct purpose. I don't believe the Bible is there as an arbitrary collection of Jewish stories. The stories have a point, and as I've mentioned before, God always has a point. The point of Job, isn't to be a story of God's cruelty or mindless suffering. I think Job was a story that foreshadowed Christ - in telling how the innocent do suffer through no fault of their own.

That idea is a contradiction to "Whatsoever a man soweth so shall he reap" and shows in the example of Jesus' disciples or maybe it was just some on-lookers, who wondered about the blind man whether he was blind due to his own sin or the sins of his fathers.

That's the purpose of the story of Job - to make it clear that there isn't always an easy answer. God never really answers Job, you know, as to why these bad things happened to him. And I don't believe that God is so petty that he thinks another set of children make up for losing the first set. Job may have increased his holdings and had more children, but the scar of what happened to the first must have been there always.

Both the first and second Temples were destroyed on the exact same day - the 9th of Av, on the Jewish calendar.

I don't know that I really like the link that says Christians expect Christ's return on Rosh Hashana. Number one, Rosh Hashana is a period of time. It is certainly a metaphor for Christ's return, for all the reasons mentioned. But why not the Day of Atonement?/ Yom Kippur, whose name in English means "the day of covering or concealing?" Those raptured could be said to be covered or concealed. Or the Feast of Booths or Sukkot, which means "the season of our rejoicing." For surely Christians will rejoice in the day of Christ's return. Or the spring feasts, with their promise of new growth?

In other words, for those wanting to pinpoint a day, things get really blurry really fast. Jesus is said to have been killed before the Passover, which in turn was a remembrance of when the Angel of Death passed over the children of Israel. In retrospect, of course, that fits. But he could have died on the Day of Atonement as well, and we still would have said, "Oh, that fits. He is the scape goat."

If Jesus returns on an Easter morning, we will all say, "Oh, that fits. He rose from the dead on that day." And if on Sukkot, then that fits too.

While I appreciate the way that commentators on this remind Christians that their religion was not born in a vacuum but has a history, I really don't like the attaching of seasons or dates to it. A lot of things can fit. Who would have thought that Jonah spending 3 days in the belly of a whale would be related to the Son of Man spending 3 days in the belly of the earth?

But if on the other hand, your point is about the connection between Judaism and Christianity, Mennonites never lost sight of that connection. We always valued the OT as much as the NT. But I think it might be news to a lot of Christians. I have never been able to understand anti-semitism on the part of so-called Christians considering the Jew from Galilee they claim to follow.

Layla