How does Jesus fulfill prophecy?
This is a tricky question to answer because people get so heated about it. However here is my take on the subject.
It seems to me that we can’t take the fulfillment of prophesy to be literal (e.g. we expect every last detail to be exactly how it is fulfilled). A good example of this is given in Christopher Wrights book about Jesus in the Old Testament. He says that if a father promised his young son a horse (for transport) and when his son was fully grown instead he bought him a car (the world has moved on and engineers have developed a car) his son would not complain that his father had not kept his promise to provide for his sons transport needs. The promise has been fulfilled but in a different way that was originally described.
This makes a lot of sense to me. If God describes something at one time in such a way so we can understand it this doesn’t mean that when the world is different and God fulfills it in a slightly different way (but retains the essence of the promise – e.g. to be with you or forgive sins etc) that this means something is wrong.
So if God fulfills all of the essence of his promises in Jesus why should we complain.
If you look at Matthews gospel for instance you would see that Matthew uses the old testament in just this way. He points to the essence of what God was predicting about his messiah and the new convenant and then shows that Jesus is the fulfillment of that promise. This is why sometimes the quotes that Matthew uses are a little confusing at times (e.g. the quote from Jeremiah when Herod has the innocent children of Bethlehem slaughtered).
So what does that mean for now? Well perhaps it means that we shouldn’t be looking for the details in prophecies and expecting God to fulfill them using those details. For instance perhaps looking at the old testament peoples who are mentioned and expecting to transfer those peoples into a modern day world. Perhaps such a literal view of prophecy is misleading.
What do you think? Am I wrong? If I am what could you say to convince me otherwise?