One of the great advantages of having the Old Testament and the New Testament in one Bible is that they give support to each other. Together they strengthen our faith that both are God's word.

So if you are Jewish or come from a Jewish background your confidence in the Old Testament -- the Jewish Scriptures -- may be strong. Yes, and with good reason. And so when you see the amazing fulfillments of the Old Testament in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and His teachings, and the movement of Christianity that He unleashes, your confidence in the New Testament is made stronger.

Or if you have never read a syllable of the Old Testament and hear the story of Jesus Christ and His life and teaching and death and resurrection and the movement He unleashed you may be overpowered by the truth and relevance and credibility of Christ and believe that He really is who He says He is and become a Christian. And then you discover that this Jesus embraces and endorses the whole Old Testament as true and reliable Scripture (as in Matthew 5:17 when He said, "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill"). And so your confidence in the Old Testament grows because of the New Testament.

And so it works all through the Christian life. The better you know Jesus Christ, the better you know the roots of His life and ministry in the Old Testament where God was at work to prepare for the coming of His Son into history. And the better you know the Old Testament, the better you know the meaning of Jesus Christ and what He came to fulfill that God had been planning for so long.

So I thought it would deepen our understanding and strengthen our faith if we fixed our gaze on the resurrection of Jesus as it was described by the prophet Isaiah 700 years before it happened. Here in Isaiah 53 we will see the content and the confirmation of the resurrection of Christ -- content because the precious meaning of it for our lives is opened to us; and confirmation because it was predicted 700 years before it happened.

The View of Islam

Don't miss the significance of this in a day when the question of Islam is much on people's mind. I had my first serious conversation with a well-trained Muslim about 20 years ago. I discovered for the first time that if you share the good news of the death and resurrection of Christ with a Muslim you will find out that Muslim's do not believe Jesus died on the cross for sinners and rose again but that there was a replacement on the cross; He escaped death and later was taken to heaven. The Q'ran, sura 4:156-157 says: "... and for their [the Jews'] saying: 'We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God' -- yet they did not slay Him, neither crucified Him, only a likeness of that was shown to them. Those regarding Him; they have no knowledge of Him, except the following of surmise; and they slew Him not of a certainty -- no indeed; God raised Him up to Him; God is all-mighty, All-wise."