3 March Daily Question

What does Scripture mean by “fulfillment”? (Use the citation from Hosea as an example in your answer.) Second, identify anything you can see in these opening chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that addresses the elements of the Old Testament narrative that we discussed last class.

The words that Hosea the Prophet spoke were “that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (Mt 2:15). The “fulfillment” that Hosea touches on here has in a way already has already been completed as touched on by the reading. God called his chosen “son” out of Egypt and fulfilled the covenant he kept with the people of Israel and Abraham by delivering them(eventually) to the promise land and making of them a great and holy (eventually) nation. However, there are levels to this prophecy and even though it does refer to the past, it also looks forward to the future, as the reading states: Already in Isaiah, however, we see the prophecy pressing on toward the future. Fulfillment isn’t just the promise then that God made to Israel, but the fulfillment rather of his goal for all man to be welcomed in to the kingdom of Heaven and restoring the bonds that was broken after the committing of the first sin and the subsequent depravity of man. The genealogy of Matthew and the symmetry thats represented there gives an almost linear path from the Old Testament to the birth of Jesus and lays out a clear map of the elect throughout all of the Old Testament. In the Gospel of Luke, the first thing that stands out is the similarities between the birth of John the Baptist and the birth of Isaac from Abraham and Sarah. Both are births from barren mothers that the Lord is able to allow to conceive.