Introduction

The story of how Jesus came to offer salvation is a beautiful picture...but it's only part of the story. The story begins MUCH earlier, in the Old Testament.

Some of the things we read about in the Gospels can't be answered without understanding at least something of the Old Testament. Things like, what is a Messiah? Why did Jesus have to be descended from King David? Who were the Pharisees and Sadducees?

Part of the reason that so much confusion and division exists within Christianity today is that their understanding isn't built on starting with the Old Testament first, and then looking at the New Testament through the lens of the Old. Rather, theologians start with Jesus and the New Testament, and then try to understand the Old through the lens of the New. That leads to not only incomplete understanding, but also differing interpretations.

In this series of short articles, I hope to give you a solid foundation to fully understand God's plan of salvation, by building out that foundation by learning exactly what the Old Testament is supposed to tell us. To keep things as simple as possible, I'll be focusing on a series of repeated themes, which you can follow through these articles and see how they help to explain Jesus and His message.

Some of those repeated themes include:

• Why was it important for a people to have their own land?
• How did ancient peoples protect themselves?
• If the love of people, one for another, all grew cold together, what would be the natural result of that?
• If a person - or an entire generation - sinned, who ended up paying the price for that sin, in practice?
• God established Israel as a people with a set of national laws. How did those laws compare to the laws of the surrounding nations? How did they compare to the laws of the Romans? How did those laws change?
• How was authority handled in ancient Israel? Who had authority, and what did they have authority over?
• God made covenantal promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to King David. Later prophets - including Moses - referred back to these covenantal promises, explaining what would become of those promises in their day.
• God made "land" promises to Jacob that didn't just include the land of Israel. What became of those "land" promises later in the Bible? Are some of those promises just a "dangling plot thread" that never gets picked up again, anywhere in Scripture?
• Finally, where did the idea of having a king over Israel come from? Was it just a temporary change to the status quo that God simply "never wanted," or was there more to it than that? Why did Jesus have to descend from God's anointed king over Israel - King David?

These themes will get developed over the following series of articles, so you'll want to read each one of them. You can skip around to topics of interest if you wish, but don't leave any of these articles out if you want to understand the full context of Jesus' mission and God's plan of salvation.

By the end of the Intertestamental period, you'll see that things have gotten about as far as they could possibly be from the promises God made, especially concerning the Kingdom. And yet in the New Testament, Jesus begins preaching that the Kingdom of God is "near." Why? What did He actually mean, and how cam we tell?

Significantly, in Acts 3:19-21 Peter says this:

Repent therefore and turn again [to God], that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before, whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.

What are "the times of restoration of all things," and why is Jesus' return connected to them? And even more importantly, which comes first, these times of restoration, or Jesus' return? How do we know?

By the time we get to the end of this series of posts, I hope to conclusively demonstrate exactly what that passage means.