God's Final Revelation

There is progressive revelation throughout the whole of scripture where later prophets correct earlier biblical texts as God sheds more light for his people through the ages.
God is viewed as totally sovereign over every sphere of life from a Jewish perspective and what one will find throughout scripture is all events, good or bad come from the hand of God. Unless we understand how God allows evil rather than creating it, we will misunderstand the ancient Jewish writers  perspective. 

          The Hebrew scriptures are accommodations from God and God speaking through people and to people to where they can understand things in their present circumstances and cultural conventions. One must especially consider the ancient-near- eastern (ANE) world that Jesus grew up in. Jesus uses speech and ideas that were normal for his day. If modern interpreters simply read in their modern ideas of their world back into the scriptures, they will end up not only doing violence to the biblical texts but fully missing the deeper points that the scriptures are trying to teach us.

          Jesus is presented by his disciples who wrote the four gospels as someone who continually shocked and scandalized the keepers of the laws. People were more important than defending ancient laws for Jesus and bringing people into God’s kingdom was more important than keeping people out. Jesus had an uncanny ability to turn many of the conventional religious wisdom of his day on its head.

The issue for Jesus was not that he was against the Mosaic Law but he was fulfilling and completing it within himself as he brought the law back into its fully intended purpose. Jesus ministered compassion, mercy, and justice to people that more accurately represented God than the religious leaders of his day that neglected these important things.

          Jesus not only taught the Torah but he embodied it. When the woman is caught in the actual act of adultery, the religious leaders try to trap Jesus by pressing the ancient law to kill this woman (John ch.8). The law prescribed the death sentence (Duet.22:22, Lev.20:10). Jesus opposes the law because God is a God of the living, not the dead. God is a God for life whereas the enemy Satan comes to kill, steal, and destroy (Mark 12:27, John 10:10).

          What one sees in the Hebrew Bible is a collection of multiple and sometimes competing voices each claiming to be an authoritative correct view. If we learn anything from the book of Job, not all those voices are correct and Jesus definitely makes his own choices on what voices to listen to in the Old Testament and which ones to either ignore or not follow. When it comes to the Law and the prophets, God’s progressive final revelation tells us on the mount of transfiguration that the only voice we should pat attention to is the voice of Jesus (Luke 9:35).