Most Christians know that the Bible presents Jesus as Israel's Messiah in the fulfillment

of many of the prophecies and promises of the Old Testament.

And yet, sometimes we don't know exactly how Jesus fulfilled these things, or why it matters

for our understanding of Him and His mission. In our interview today, I'm talking with Benjamin Glad about how the Gospel of Luke draws on the riches of the Old Testament

to reveal truly amazing things about the identity of Jesus, Old Testament prophecy, and the real meaning of Christmas.

Benjamin currently serves as Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological

Seminary and is the author of From the Manger to the Throne, a Theology of Luke, which is part of Crossway's New Testament theology series.

Let's get started.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining me today on the Crossway podcast.

Oh, it's so good to be here. Thanks for having me.

So today we're going to talk a little bit about Christmas, about this coming of Jesus that we read about in the Gospels.

And in particular, looking at a little bit of the Old Testament background that sort of surrounds the retelling of the Christmas story throughout the Gospels, and in particular in the Book of Luke. But before we get into that, I think a lot of Christians, all Christians to some extent know that there is this Old Testament background to Jesus' birth.

We get that, we have a sense of that. We talk about that in how we

describe Christmas, in the songs that we sing about Christmas. And yet sometimes I think that we don't

always know how all of that Old Testament, those prophecies and illusions, how they all actually

connect to him. We know that they do, but we don't really know how. So I'm hoping we can

dig into some of those today. I guess first big picture, how does the gospel of Luke in particular,

why is it significant to this idea of an Old Testament background to Jesus's birth?

It's significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, we can trace how the Old Testament is used throughout the

gospel, especially here in the infancy narratives, the first couple chapters. But what's even more

compelling is we see on the back end, particularly in Luke 24 when Jesus is on the road to

Emmaus with the two disciples, and he explains to them.

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