The Messiah According to Jesus

How Christ read Israel’s Scriptures as the witness to His suffering, glory, and mission

After the resurrection, Jesus explained His death and resurrection by returning His disciples to Israel’s Scriptures.

Luke says that, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets,” Jesus interpreted to them “the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27, ESV). Later, He told them that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44, ESV).

Jesus was not appealing to one isolated prediction. He was teaching His disciples to understand His messianic identity through the whole witness of Scripture. Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had prepared them to understand the Messiah’s suffering, resurrection, and mission to the nations.

The question, then, is not only how Christians should read the Old Testament. It is how Jesus Himself read the Scriptures that testified to Him.

Luke tells us that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52, ESV). This does not diminish His divinity. The eternal Son truly became man. In His humanity, He grew, learned, prayed, listened, and obeyed. His life was not staged obedience. He lived before the Father as the faithful Son.

That matters when we see Him in the wilderness.

When Satan tempted Him, Jesus answered each temptation from Deuteronomy. “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4, ESV). “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7, ESV). “You shall worship the Lord your God” (Matthew 4:10, ESV).

Those answers all come from Deuteronomy 6–8, where Moses reflects on Israel’s wilderness testing. Israel had been humbled, fed with manna, warned not to test the Lord, and commanded to worship Him alone. Jesus enters the wilderness after being declared the beloved Son, fasts forty days, and answers Satan from the Scriptures that interpreted Israel’s forty years.

His obedience is not generic moral resolve. He stands as the faithful Son where Israel had been faithless. He lives by every word from the mouth of God. He refuses to test the Father. He rejects worship offered apart from obedience. In the wilderness, Jesus is already revealing the shape of His mission through Israel’s Scriptures.

The same pattern appears in His use of the title Son of Man.

For many readers, “Son of Man” may sound like a simple reference to Jesus’ humanity. But Daniel 7 gives the title royal and heavenly weight. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” coming with the clouds of heaven, receiving “dominion and glory and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:13–14, ESV). His kingdom is everlasting. All peoples, nations, and languages serve Him.

Jesus uses that title for Himself, but He joins it to suffering.

After Peter confesses Him as the Christ, Jesus begins to teach that “the Son of Man must suffer many things,” be rejected, killed, and rise again (Mark 8:31, ESV). The word must carries theological weight. Jesus does not describe suffering as an unfortunate interruption of messianic hope. He teaches it as necessary to the Messiah’s mission.

Here Jesus brings together Scripture’s witness to glory and suffering. Daniel 7 gives the Son of Man authority, dominion, and an everlasting kingdom. Isaiah 53 speaks of the servant who is “pierced for our transgressions” and bears the sins of many. Jesus teaches that the Messiah’s glory does not bypass suffering. The path to the throne runs through rejection, atonement, death, and resurrection.

This is not Jesus reshaping the Messiah into something Israel’s Scriptures had never anticipated. It is Jesus revealing the Messiah those Scriptures had been preparing for, while correcting expectations that could imagine kingdom more easily than crucifixion.

Karl Barth’s concern is helpful here: “the Christ of the New Testament is the Christ of the Old Testament, the Christ of Israel.” Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. He is the obedient Son, the suffering servant, the Son of Man, the crucified and risen Lord.

Jesus Himself made that connection unavoidable.

In John 5, Jesus tells the religious leaders that the Scriptures themselves “bear witness about me” (John 5:39, ESV). They were reading the right Scriptures, but they were not understanding where those Scriptures were leading. They studied the text, yet refused the Christ the text was meant to reveal.

After the resurrection, Jesus corrected the same kind of misunderstanding in His disciples. They had seen Him crucified. They had heard reports of the empty tomb. Yet they still had not understood that the Messiah’s suffering and resurrection belonged to the scriptural witness all along.

So He opened Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

Jesus’ reading of Scripture shapes how Christians should read the Old Testament today. The Old Testament is not merely where Christians find predictions about Jesus. It is where God gives the categories by which Jesus reveals His identity and work: covenant, sacrifice, priesthood, kingdom, exile, judgment, mercy, holiness, redemption, promise, and fulfillment.

Without Israel’s Scriptures, Christian language about Jesus may remain true, but it often loses depth. “Savior” belongs to the story of exodus, deliverance, covenant, and return. “Sacrifice” belongs to the world of priesthood, blood, guilt, cleansing, and access to God. “King” carries the promises to David and the hope of God’s reign over the nations. “Son of Man” carries Daniel’s vision of dominion and glory. “Christ crucified” carries Isaiah’s witness to the servant who suffers for the sins of many.

Luke 24 does not end with Jesus moving His disciples beyond Israel’s Scriptures. It ends with Him opening those Scriptures so they could finally understand His death and resurrection. The cross had not disproved messianic hope. The resurrection had not replaced Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Jesus showed that His suffering, His resurrection, and the preaching of repentance and forgiveness to the nations were what those Scriptures had been leading toward all along.

That is the Messiah according to Jesus: not a Christ separated from Israel’s story, but the Christ revealed through it.