Self-Portraits of God

Studies in the Life and Work of Jesus

Lesson 5: Drawings by the Prophets: Old Testament Prophecies of the Coming One

Promises, Predictions, and Self-portraits

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives; and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn, To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified

In the Mirror which is our lives we see reflected the many faces of the Ever-present One; He who is the Architect of the Father draws many lines in His own face. When we look for Him in our lives we face a world of many faces.

When my daughter was little she had some toys called transformers; one never knew what they would be configured as the next time they were present in her play. Their visible form changed as the story line being imagined changed. But of course there was a limit to the changes that could be arranged by the moving of their parts.

In this review of some of the drawings by the prophets appearing in the Old Testament depicting the One bringing the redemption for His created children, we have observed that the ability to change, to be the Transformer, has only that limit which equals the needs of those the Given One seeks to help.

This Transformer differs from the toys my daughter had for play, not only in the unlimited varieties of the self-revelation form, but in the unlimited forms of change that can be made in the essential nature of the objects for whom the wide variety of selfrevelations are made.

Once upon a time, the way that all good stories start, there was a little boy who loved to do the same things that his father did.

Each day as his father would start off to work this little boy would express the wish to go to work with his dad, and each day his father would tell him that he could not go because he was too little.

But time went on and one day the father said to his son, as he was leaving for work, ask your mother to fix you a lunch for tomorrow, and then you can go to work with me.

The next day father and son went to the father’s work together.

The day went by quickly for the little boy. When the working men were all starting to go home the father came to the boy and told him that he had to go down by the creek and then he would be ready to go home; he told his son to wait there where he was. The little boy waited for his dad, but his dad did not return. It began to get dark and the little boy started to get cold so he crawled into a small hut there and soon was sound asleep.

He woke up hearing the sounds of men talking quietly. When he opened his eyes he saw men walking around outside the hut where he was sleeping, looking at the ground. When they saw that he was awake they asked him if any thing strange had happened. He said no; that his father had told him to wait there- that he would come right back, but that he had not returned- that during the night he had started to get cold, but that his dog had come and kept him warm; but that he had left earlier.

That was no dog, the men said to the little boy; that was a panther.

When His children are in need. Him “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” Micah 5:2.

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” Isaiah 53:1.

One of our professors had a degree in comparative religions and another degree in anthropology; so the Government of New Guinea hired him to do a study of the people living in an unmapped area of their country.

To do this study required him to walk through the jungles, making trails where there were none. So carriers and trackers were hired and their journey was begun. This professor was of Dutch nationality, very white skinned, and would sometimes be burned so dark that his wife would not recognize him immediately when he returned from a survey trip.

One day they had been traveling until the professor said to the carriers that he was so tired that he could walk no farther. Everyone stopped and started to prepare for the night, except for the exhausted professor who immediately crawled into a small hut some earlier traveler had left there and was just as immediately fast asleep.

He awoke to the sound the natives make when something is wrong. Recognizing the warning sound he opened his eyes but did not move. There, hanging out of the brush making the roof for the little hut he was sleeping in was a very deadly snake; it was swinging back and forth over his face. Without moving he tensed every one of his muscles as tight as he could and suddenly sprang out of the little sleeping hut. The natives killed the snake. But there was a problem.

The snake which had been hanging over the professor was the snake which seduced the woman in the Garden, in the culture of the people who were traveling with the professor as he surveyed the people of the region.

Every culture has a form of the three stories that start the story of the Bible- the story of Creation of the world and man, the entrance of sickness and suffering in connection with the snake and the woman in the Garden, and the story of the Flood. In the story of the fall of man in the culture of the people the professor was traveling with, the husband had come home to find that his wife had run off with the snake. God said to him, when you catch up to them you are to kill the snake.

So the husband started tracking them, but when he caught up to them he got so mad that instead of killing the snake he began to beat his wife and the snake got away. Therefore when those snakes are all caught and killed there will no longer be hunger, or sickness.

The next morning the carriers refused to continue the journey because it would not be safe; the devil was on their track. The only thing to do was to return to their starting point and start over again. But the group had traveled a large distance, so the professor tried to reason with the carriers, but it did no good until one of them said that if the group were to cut a new wandering trail, the devils would get lost and they could safely continue their travel. So they all started on their trip again, cutting a new trailsome thing which they would continue to do for three days, and then the devils would have become lost.

The people of this region never wear shoes and the bottoms of their feet are as tough as leather.

Suddenly as the group was cutting a section of new trail the lead men fell down in pain—their feet bleeding. Someone had hidden large thorns in the ground.

And then arrows started to fly! Fortunately peace was made and the group was taken to meet the chief of the area. Everything went quite normally, except that the professor estimated that there were several times as many huts for people to live in as there were people to live in them.

When he questioned the people about the huts they said that someone came to the mountain to teach them every evening; that one of the things they had learned was that the dead were going to live again- so they had built the huts so they—the resurrected oneswould have a place to live.

Here is a moving picture of the whole of creation, with the presence of God shadowing every frame.