Dr. James Rosscup · The Master's Seminary · 88 minutes
Lecture by Dr. James Rosscup, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course's final session finishes the crucial questions, what of the New Testament's silence on the land, what of Ezekiel's measured temple, what does the literal first advent prove, and then puts the whole semester's toolkit to work on a single glorious test case: Isaiah 7:14 and the virgin's son. Listen for how every principle learned since week one, word study, near and far context, cross-reference, clarity, returns for the finale, and for the closing self-description that could stand over the entire course: I'm a messenger boy for him.
Amillennial interpreters observe that no New Testament verse commands Israel's regathering to its land, and conclude the Old Testament's land promises resolve spiritually into the church. Rosscup answers that silence is not denial, and the New Testament is not quite silent: the meek shall inherit the earth carries Psalm 37's land promise forward; Paul names his literal tribe of Benjamin; Hebrews sets Christ in literal Judah; and Revelation 7 counts twelve named tribes, which every other tribal list in Scripture takes literally. How many times must God say a thing for it to stand? Once.
Ezekiel's structure frames the temple question. Chapters 1 to 24 prophesy Babylon's literal judgment on Judah, through direct oracles, enacted signs, visions, and parables, all fulfilled. Chapters 25 to 32 pronounce literal judgments on the surrounding nations, fulfilled in datable history. Chapter 33 brings the refugee's report: the city has fallen, literally. Thirty-three chapters literal, and then chapters 34 to 48 turn to Israel's future: regathering, the northern invader, a measured temple, tribal allotments. On what principle does the interpretation switch to non-literal exactly where the blessings begin?
Ezekiel 40 to 46 records a temple in painstaking dimensions, an angel walking the prophet through wall after measured wall. If the fulfillment is Christ's risen body, or the church as God's temple, or the New Jerusalem, what were the measurements for? None of those readings gives the numbers any purpose, and the New Jerusalem comparison collapses outright: Ezekiel's complex measures about a mile to a side, Revelation's city over thirteen hundred miles in each dimension, a cube with death nowhere in it, while Ezekiel's chapters include sacrifices and therefore death. Even a magisterial recent commentary, superb on Ezekiel's history, turns strange exactly here.
Do Ezekiel's millennial sacrifices compete with the once-for-all offering of Hebrews? No: they are memorial, not efficacious, tangible offerings looking back to Calvary exactly as the bread and cup do in the church's worship today. Old Testament sacrifices never took away sin either, the blood of bulls and goats cannot, but God, the great I AM, saw Calvary through them and honored the faith they expressed. Forward-pointing then, backward-pointing in the kingdom, and the wonder always in the cross alone.
Christ came literally out of Abraham's nation, literally out of Judah's tribe per Genesis 49, literally in David's line per the covenant of 2 Samuel 7, literally on Daniel 9's timetable, literally at Micah's Bethlehem, literally rejected per Isaiah 53, literally risen per Psalm 16 and ascended per Psalm 110. Literal, literal, literal for the first advent; why switch hermeneutics for the second? The converted Jewish scholar Charles Feinberg pressed the point unforgettably: you are literal on all the judgments to my people; why do you take away our literal blessings?
The interpreter must correlate Daniel's smiting stone and Son of Man with the Olivet discourse, with Romans 11's all Israel shall be saved, and with Revelation's thousand years and measured city, weaving conclusions into one consistent whole, and so decide at last, premill, amill, or postmill, but not, Rosscup pleads, however-it-pans-out mill. As for the return of Jewish people to the land since 1948, he claims carefully: it could be a prelude, God setting the stage; it is not itself the promised regathering, but it shows the nation present, viable, and unforgotten.
Ezekiel 36 promises return to the land that I gave to your fathers, and Genesis identifies that land: Palestine, the same terra firma by the same seas through every century. Trading it for the church's spiritual blessings abandons any normal use of words. Yet the disagreement stays within the family: amillennialists are beloved brothers and sisters, mistaken here in Rosscup's judgment, and whoever proves wrong will say in glory, bless the Lord, O my soul, now I see it, though it is better to get it right and teach it right now.
The principles for interpreting prophecy are the semester's own: word study, near and far context, cross-reference, grammar, background, clarity, progressive revelation, literal but never woodenly literal. And the warning cuts every direction: mind-made-up hermeneutics disfigures Rome's reading of the rock, the Kingdom Hall's reading of the firstborn, and equally the dispensationalist who strains the new covenant or Joel 2 because his system's conclusion is foregone. Be open before God, let the passages teach, and then see which system the conclusions fit.
The test case begins with Ahaz trembling like wind-shaken trees before two invading kings, whom God dismisses as two stubs of smoldering firebrands. God offers the king any sign, deep as Sheol or high as heaven, ask for something great, not pipsqueak, and Ahaz declines in pious-sounding unbelief. Therefore the Lord himself gives the sign: the almah shall conceive and bear a son, and call his name Immanuel, a child of curds and honey, tokens of the poverty that later marked the family whose temple offering was two turtledoves.
Interpreters divide three ways: a near child plus Jesus in double fulfillment; a near child only, with Matthew simply wrong; or Jesus only, the view of Feinberg, of Edward J. Young's great Isaiah commentary, of Freeman and Payne, and of Rosscup. Word study carries the day: the proposed near child's name means hasting to the spoil, a terror-name announcing Assyrian devastation, the very opposite of Immanuel, God with us, a comfort-name. And almah in its Old Testament usage denotes an unmarried maiden, as Rebekah, which Isaiah's wife, mother already of the boy standing beside the prophet, was not; the evidence-free second-wife theory is convenience, not exegesis.
The wider context seals it: Isaiah keeps interrupting history with a child, the son of chapter 9 who is Mighty God and Prince of Peace, the shoot of Jesse in chapter 11 bearing the sevenfold Spirit into a kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb, rather than, as now, the lamb lying down inside the lion, the servant formed from the womb in chapter 49, the root out of dry ground led as a lamb in chapter 53. A God-man child, royalty and redemption together. And the immediate context demanded a sign as vast as the offer, Sheol-deep or heaven-high: a routine birth is no such sign; a virgin's is. Matthew 1 answers with parthenos and a studied protection of Mary's virginity, that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
But how could a birth centuries away be relevant to Ahaz? Exactly as the rapture, nineteen centuries unfulfilled, anchors believing souls today; as Abraham held promises he never saw completed; as Jeremiah bought the field at Anathoth and sealed a title deed God will yet honor. A promise believed comforts before it is fulfilled, because the God who spoke it is faithful. Ahaz's tragedy was not distance but unbelief. And when weighing the scholars who make Matthew mistaken, inspect fruit, hermeneutics can be examined, as open theism's misreading of now I know in Genesis 22 can be answered, but leave motives to God, and confess how mixed our own can be.
Later Scripture can show a promise still open: Solomon's wide dominion in 1 Kings 4 did not exhaust Genesis 15, for Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Joel, and Zephaniah go on promising the land centuries afterward. Prophecies also telescope near and far in one package, as Jesus proved at Nazareth by stopping mid-sentence in Isaiah 61 before the day of vengeance. And the course closes in character: a gracious written answer to a troubled couple about a beloved author's book, wrapped in honor and agreements, with the plea to build up their church rather than win an argument, sugar over vinegar; then the last word every student is meant to carry into ministry: I want to represent what God has said the way he intended, because I'm a messenger boy for him.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does the lecture answer the New Testament's alleged silence on Israel's land?
2. What pattern do Ezekiel's first thirty-three chapters establish?
3. What defeats the reading of Ezekiel's temple as the New Jerusalem?
4. How do Ezekiel's millennial sacrifices relate to the once-for-all cross?
5. What was Charles Feinberg's unforgettable challenge?
6. How does the lecture assess the return of Jewish people to the land since 1948?
7. What identifies the land of Ezekiel 36:28?
8. Against whom does the warning about foregone conclusions cut?
9. What was the nature of the sign God offered Ahaz?
10. How does word study separate the near child from Immanuel?
11. What does almah denote in its Old Testament usage?
12. How do Isaiah's other sudden children support the Jesus-only reading?
13. How can a centuries-distant promise comfort a present generation?
14. Why does 1 Kings 4 not exhaust the land promise of Genesis 15?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 15 is complete.
You are literal on the judgments; why not the blessings? Where might we, in any doctrine, be quicker to apply Scripture's hard words than its promises, and what would even-handed reading change?
Ahaz was offered a sign as deep as Sheol or high as heaven and asked for nothing. Where has pious-sounding caution kept you from trusting God for something great, and what would asking look like?
Rosscup's parting self-description is a messenger boy for God. What would change in how our congregation handles disputed passages if every teacher and reader took that title first?
The sign of Isaiah 7:14, claimed and answered in Matthew 1: behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means, God with us. The promise Ahaz refused became the comfort of the world.
The lecture's own trail: Edward J. Young's three-volume Isaiah and Feinberg's study of the virgin birth in the Old Testament for the Jesus-only case; Payne's Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy for the whole predictive field; the premillennial Ezekiel commentaries of Enns, Alexander, and Feinberg on the measured temple and its memorial sacrifices; and the course's abiding assignment: run every disputed prophecy through the same tools, word study, contexts near and far, cross-reference, and clarity, as a patient messenger of what God has actually said.