You Tube Theology

Tim Mackie argues that the entirety of Israel's scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament, which Jesus referred to as the Torah of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms—is fundamentally about the Messiah's path of unjust suffering, death, vindication through resurrection on the third day, and the subsequent proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, a summary Jesus provides in Luke 24 after opening his disciples' minds to understand the scriptures. This melody, first introduced in Genesis with God's creation of order from chaos, the infusion of divine breath into human image-bearers tasked with bridging heaven and earth, their tragic fall under the serpent's deception into exile, death, and cycles of violence, recurs exhaustively throughout the Hebrew Bible: Noah, the righteous servant preserved through de-creation waters, offers sacrifice prompting God's forgiveness and covenant never to flood again; Abraham and Sarah, called from Babel's rebellion, surrender via altars leading to promised blessing for nations; and this pattern echoes in Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Ruth, David, Esther, Daniel, each righteous intercessor wading into suffering, crying out, and securing divine mercy for others despite human failure. The Book of Job fits this jazz-like improvisation on the core melody perfectly—Job, twice called God's blameless, righteous servant like Noah and Abraham, endures Satan the Hostile One's accusations and unmerited disasters, holds integrity amid lament, yearns for God's face, repents in dust and ashes upon divine encounter, then intercedes with sacrifice for his foreign friends from surrounding nations, releasing forgiveness and restoration while still suffering, not as a treatise solving the problem of evil or a divine wager gone wrong, but as a portrait of the Messiah who stares into Eden's wreckage without compromising, directing anger at the serpent's lie rather than God. Misreading arises from treating the Bible as a heavenly answer manual for personal questions, like a hammer misused for digging instead of nails, missing its purpose to silhouette humanity's need for one perfect intercessor; Jesus fulfills this as the greater Job, baptized as God's favored one, led by the Spirit into wilderness suffering, shouldering evil's plunder, healing the snake-bound, emerging victorious to preach good news, his cross and resurrection crescendoing the melody. Mackie, obsessed since his early faith struggles with talking snakes, floods, scandals, and poetry seemingly unrelated to Jesus, urges Christians not to skip the Old Testament but apprentice under Job's lament, channeling despair toward the true enemy, imitating the righteous servant's surrender in community, allowing their lives to cycle the melody onward—not to save the world, but united to the Savior who did, fostering intolerance for suffering while trusting God's personal response over pocketable answers.

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