Therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech—unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away. But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 2 Corinthians 3:12–16
When Moses descended from his conference with God at Sinai, he was unaware that his face shone with God’s glory (Exodus 34:29). So brightly did it shine that he had to veil his face for the sake of the people as he delivered God’s words to them (vv 30–35). For many of the Jews of Jesus’ day, they saw in the Old Testament two images of the Messiah which they struggled to reconcile. Jesus brought this struggle to the foreground of the discussion when He asked His critics how the Christ could be at the same time David’s Son and Lord (Matthew 22:41–46; cf. Psalms 110:1). Paul later said that all who fail to see Jesus as the Christ still have Moses’ veil over their hearts.
When they read about the Christ in the OT, they saw a triumphant warrior who would break the nations with a rod of iron (Psalms 2:6–9) and receive an everlasting dominion from God (Daniel 7:13–14), but they missed the suffering servant who would be “despised and rejected by men” (Isaiah 53:3) and “led as a lamb to the slaughter” (v 7). They saw an eternal priest of the order of Melchizedek who would execute kings and judge nations (Psalms 110), but they struggled to reconcile this with the servant who would be “cut off from the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8), “make His grave with the wicked” (v 9), and be “numbered with the transgressors” (v 12). They saw the one of whose government and peace there would be no end (Isaiah 9:7), but they failed to see how it could ever please God to bruise Him and put Him to grief (Isaiah 53:10). They saw the good shepherd (Psalms 23), but not the spotless lamb who would be “wounded for our transgressions” and heal us with His stripes (Isaiah 53:4–5). In short, they saw the glory, but they overlooked the suffering that led to the glory (1 Peter 1:11), and when they missed that, they missed the most wondrous thing about the Messiah: He is not only mighty, but also full of compassion.
The true Messiah may have confounded the Jews’ vain expectations, yet He fulfilled every prophecy. In the first place, He seemed too ordinary: “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” (Matthew 13:54). Many refused to believe that anything good––especially the Messiah––could come from Galilee, and yet Isaiah declared that light would shine forth from “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Isaiah 9:1–2) in the same passage that promised that a Child would bear the eternal government of God’s people (vv 6–7). Jesus also seemed too weak. When guards apprehended Him in Gethsemane, He offered no resistance and refused assistance from His disciples, who all promptly forsook Him and fled (Matthew 26:52–56). Is it any wonder that the crowd chose Barabbas over Jesus when Pilate offered them the option (Matthew 27:17)? After all, at least Barabbas had proved himself a man of action (Mark 15:7). And if it wasn’t bad enough that Jesus was forsaken by His disciples at the crucial moment, it would appear that He was even forsaken by God (Matthew 27:43), and yet even in this He fulfilled Scripture (Isaiah 53:4).
Jesus did not come to be the kind of Messiah the Jews were looking for, nor did He come to be the kind of Messiah that I am looking for. If we wish to see Jesus for who He truly is, we must be willing to remove the veil of our own prejudices. “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:17–18).