In my last two blogs about the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Branch we have seen that one prophecy concerns the Branch, Jesus Christ, as a king. And the second concerns the Branch as the servant of the Lord. Correspondingly we have seen that Matthew picks up the theme of the king while Mark presents the servant. Now we come to the third prophecy again in the book of Zechariah.
Behold, the Man whose name is the BRANCH! From His place He shall branch out, and He shall build the temple of the LORD (Zechariah 6:12).
The first feature of this third prophecy is that the one called “the Branch” is a man. This may startle some readers but Jesus is not a god/man. He is a genuine human being. There was no eternal being called God the Son (a phrase never found in the Bible). Jesus did not pre-exist in heaven as God and then decide to reduce himself and then pass through time and space and enter Mary’s womb as a baby. An entity like this is not “conceived” or “begotten” (Matthew 1: 20; Luke 1:31; John 3:16) he merely passes through one form of life into another—kind of like a sci-fi character.
In the Old Testament Jesus is prophesied to be the seed or offspring of the woman (Genesis 3:15), the seed or offspring of Abraham (Genesis 22:18) and the seed or offspring of David (2 Samuel 7:12-16). Moses declared that the Messiah would be a prophet like himself (Deuteronomy 18:15, 18). Nowhere in the Old Testament is there ever the tiniest hint that Jesus is a god/man; he is presented as a genuine man.
Luke’s gospel corresponds to the prophecy of “the Man whose name is the BRANCH.” And once again in Luke we have a genealogy for Christ. Matthew’s genealogy shows the royal lineage and it goes forward from Abraham to David to Jesus. But Luke’s genealogy moves backward from Jesus, through some very common people, all the way back to Adam, a real man, who is called “the son of God”!
Adam came into being by a direct act of God. And Jesus is a real man who came into existence by a direct act of God (Luke 1:35). In fact the Bible says that “in all things He [Jesus] had to be made like His brethren (Hebrews 2:17).” The Savior had to be just like the rest of us in every way except that he never gave in to sin.
In tracing Jesus’ genealogy back to Adam, Luke shows us that Jesus is not just a Jewish man, he is related to all mankind. Luke shows Jesus as a friend of publicans and sinners. He shows Jesus ministering to not only Jews but to Gentiles. We see Christ’s emotions more deeply in Luke’s gospel. And we see his dependence upon God through prayer more in Luke than in any other gospel. Jesus depended upon the power of God to do the great things that he did (Acts 2:22; 10:38).
The fact that Jesus is a real human being makes his ministry and obedience to God even to the point of death heroic! He is the only man who has ever loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. And he has won the victory that the first man, Adam, lost. Scriptures says, “Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous (Romans 5:18, 19).”
Thank you this is very powerful stuff I understand how big His love for God had to be for Jesus to not sin. So if His example to us was His life I can live my life as an example of how much I love God too.
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