Christ in 1 Maccabees

Christ Connection - The Faithful One and the Desolation Undone

This chapter gives us two images that reach straight to Christ. The first is the "abominable idol of desolation" set on the altar, the very phrase Jesus took on His own lips, warning of a desolation to come and pointing past every earthly horror to the day when all that defiles the holy will finally be cast out (Matthew 24:15). The second is the company of the faithful who "chose rather to die than to be defiled." They are an early page in the story the letter to the Hebre…

Christ Connection - The Faithful One in Whom None Are Put to Shame

Mathathias hands his sons a single promise to live and die by: "none that trust in him fail in strength." The whole New Testament is the unfolding of that promise to its limit. Where Mathathias could only point back to a roll call of the faithful, the gospel points forward to the One in whom every name in that list finds its meaning. Paul takes up the very text Mathathias begins with, Abraham’s faith "reputed to him unto justice," and shows that the righteousness reckoned…

Christ Connection - The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Judas teaches his trembling, outnumbered men a truth that runs through all of Scripture and finds its fullness in Christ: "the success of war is not in the multitude of the army, but strength cometh from heaven." The whole gospel is the story of God saving by what the world counts as weakness, choosing the few, the small, the despised, so that the glory belongs to Him alone. Paul writes that God "hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mig…

Christ Connection - The True Saviour of Israel

Judas prays to the "Saviour of Israel" and recalls how God once broke the mighty by the hand of His servant David. Those rescues were real, and they were also rehearsals. The Gospels announce a greater Son of David who would save His people from sin and death for good. The angel tells Joseph to name the child Jesus, "for he shall save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21), and Zechariah blesses "the Lord God of Israel" who "hath raised up an horn of salvation for us i…

Christ Connection - The Deliverer Who Came Down to Us

This chapter is built on a single movement: a cry goes up from people who cannot save themselves, and a deliverer comes down across the desert to where they are dying. That movement is the shape of the gospel. People sent up their cry, trapped and besieged by sin and death, and the answer came as a deliverer who came in person to where they were perishing. Judas’s word to his men, "fight ye today for your brethren," reaches toward the One who called His disciples friends a…

Christ Connection - Greater Love Hath No Man

Eleazar goes in beneath the great beast to deliver his people, and the weight of it falls on him, and he dies there. The act shines, and it also leaves us aching, because the hero perishes and the war grinds on; his death buys his people a moment. Here the chapter reaches toward the One who said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Jesus, too, went down beneath the full weight of what threatens His people, and it…

Christ Connection - The House of Prayer and the Lord Who Is the True Temple

When the priests stand weeping before the altar, they remind God that He chose this house "that it might be a house of prayer and supplication for thy people." Those words point straight to Jesus. Standing in the temple courts, He drove out those who had corrupted it and declared, "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves" (Matthew 21:13). He defended the holiness of His Father’s house with the same jealous love these priests appea…

Christ Connection - The King Whose Kingdom Does Not Pass

Judah placed its hope for deliverance in the strongest power it could find, sending envoys across the sea to bind their future to Rome. The chapter even marvels that Rome could make and unmake kings, raising up whom it wished and casting down whom it wished. But the giving and removing of kingdoms is a work Scripture assigns to God alone, and the everlasting dominion Rome only imitated belongs to Another. Daniel saw one like the Son of man given a kingdom, that all peoples…

Christ Connection - The Deliverer Who Death Could Not Hold

Israel weeps over a fallen deliverer with the ancient cry, "How is the mighty man fallen, that saved the people of Israel!" Every such grief in Scripture reaches toward a deeper one and toward an answer that goes beyond it. The deliverers God raised up in this age were mortal; they saved for a season and then they too were laid in the tomb of their fathers. When the women came weeping to a sealed grave on the first day of the week, they came expecting the same old sorrow,…

Christ Connection - The True High Priest, Robed and Exalted

Here a leader is named high priest and clothed in a purple robe and a crown of gold, lifted from the hills of war to the holy place. The image cannot help but reach forward. The New Testament announces a High Priest whose office came from no earthly king and no strategy of empires; He was called by God Himself, Jesus, "called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec" (Hebrews 5:10). Where Jonathan received his office from a king who wanted to use him, Christ "g…

Christ Connection - The Greater Priest Who Prayed Alone

Two threads in this chapter reach toward Christ. The first is the high priesthood Jonathan receives, a ministry of one man standing between God and the people, bearing their cause before the holy place. Hebrews takes that office and finds its fulfillment in Jesus, a priest who "continueth ever" with "an unchangeable priesthood," who "ever liveth to make intercession" for those who come to God through Him (Hebrews 7:24-25). No foreign king appoints Him and none can falsify…

Christ Connection - The Wall That Cannot Be Broken

Jonathan goes out so the enemy will have no time to enter his country; he keeps watch through the night while others sleep; he gathers the people to raise the broken walls of Jerusalem. Each of these reaches toward the Lord who is Israel’s true defender. The Psalmist sang, "Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain" (Psalm 127:1). Jonathan’s sentinels and stones are a shadow of the kee…

Christ Connection - The One Left to Stand and the Death That Was Not the End

Simon stands as the last of the brothers, offering his life freely for the nation and the sanctuary because he counts himself no better than those who have died. In that willing self-offering for the people of God there is a shadow of Christ, the One who would later lay down His life for the sheep, saying that the good shepherd gives his life that the flock may live (John 10:11). And the chapter’s long meditation on death and burial reaches toward Him too. Here a faithful…

Christ Connection - The Priest, the King, and the Faithful Prophet

This chapter joins in one man what Israel had long held apart, leader and high priest together, and the people seal it only "till there should arise a faithful prophet." Both threads reach forward to Christ. Simon’s peace gathers up the ancient image of every man unafraid under his vine, the picture the prophets gave of the kingdom to come, and Jesus declares, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you" (John 14:27), the wholeness no treaty could secure. Simon held…

Christ Connection - The Word That Does Not Break

This chapter is a study in broken promises. A king writes a letter brimming with grace, then tears up "all the covenant that he had made" the moment keeping it grows costly. Set against that shifting word stands the One whose word never moves. "Heaven and earth shall pass away," Jesus said, "but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24:35). Where Antiochus called the same cities a gift and then theft as it suited him, Christ is the One in whom "all the promises of God in…

Christ Connection - The Innocent Betrayed at the Table

A trusted intimate, a shared meal, an ambush sprung when the guest is most defenseless: this scene reaches forward to a darker upper room. Jesus, too, was betrayed at a table by one who ate His bread. "He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me" (John 13:18), and the betrayer’s kiss turned the sign of love into the signal for arrest (Luke 22:48). Where Ptolemy is the picture of evil rendered for good, Christ is the answer to it. Hanging among His kille…