Before Jesus was born, before David was born, before there was a nation called Israel, there was a prophecy given to Jacob on his deathbed, a message to his sons: “Judah, your brothers will praise you; your hand will be on the neck of your enemies, your father’s sons will bow down to you. . . .The scepter will not depart from Judah nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his.” (Genesis 49:9&19)

Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, and not the favorite one. By the time of Jacob’s death, Judah had displayed few clues that he would be the father of kings and a leader of the nation that would come from his family, much less a leader of “nations.” Hundreds of years later another prophesy was spoken about kingship in Israel, long before there was a king of Israel. It was spoken by a prophet named Balaam, who had no reason to lie: “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel. . . a ruler will come out of Jacob.” ( Numbers 24:17&10) Balaam’s prophesy was less detailed that Jacob’s, but it was equally a vision of the future of Israel as a unified nation securely placed in the mind and heart of God. It would be centuries before David was born and anointed king, and then more centuries before the one “to whom it belongs” would be born in Bethlehem. The angel told that one’s mother, “You will conceive and bear a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever: his kingdom will never end” (Luke 2:31-33)

Soon we will enter the season that the churches call “lent”. It is forty days of contemplation about all these things that concern the Christ from very ancient times until this mornings’ breakfast. The forty days are set aside in preparation for glorious Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, carrying the message that the prophesies continue to be fulfilled in our time. Neither Jacob nor David, nor Balaam lived on earth to experience what we experience in reading the scriptures and finding the history of salvation open in its pages. St. Augustine of the fourth and fifth centuries wrote, “The New Testament is in the Old, concealed. The Old is in the New, revealed. Today we live in the never ending kingdom of “the one to whom it belongs”; Jesus, the son of God. We are not all descendants of Jacob, but we are received into the kingdom over which Jesus reigns, as brothers and sisters of the one to whom it belongs.

Love in Him,

Prue