Alpha
Deuteronomy 18:15-16
“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see the great fire any more, lest I die.’”
Almighty God started off small with His outline for our Messiah in the opening chapter of the Bible. First, it was just a breath whispered to Eve after Adam’s fall, “And your seed will crush the serpent’s heel.” A hint that whatever sort of Messiah God would raise up on our behalf would be of man. Conceived in a mother’s womb, born in the blood and water of her anguish, through the very dust from which Adam was formed.
Then He added more detail, more color, to the initial outline. He called out to Abraham, commissioning him to leave father and mother, to found a special tribe among Adam’s race: a new people set apart by the LORD, inheriting a promise of eternal blessing that ‘from your seed all nations would be blessed.’ A hint that our Messiah wouldn’t just be a man like Adam, but a patriarch like Abraham: the head of a new people born in His blood—the seed of Eve and the seed of Israel.
Then came Aaron and Levi and the priestly class. Men central to the nation’s spiritual wellbeing, brothers in blood with all others, yet not of them. Men set apart for the high calling of holy and divine sacrament, their entire lives dedicated to divine service, with God Himself being their inheritance. A hint that our Messiah would be totally committed to the will of the Father in all things: a High Priest incarnating in our earthly affairs but always transcending them.
Then there’s Moses, a man unlike the others, with the agency to talk to God face to face as it were, to walk into the dark recesses of divine light where all others trembled to go, to thunder the testimonies of the LORD in deed as much as in word, and to stand as a mediator between Providence and his brothers. A hint that our Messiah would be a prophet too.
Oh, but that’s only the beginning!