uncle onion
I find your question very interesting. It is one I have often considered as well. I have given it a lot of study and thought and my opinion is as follows: Yes indeed the Jews were expecting a strong warrior type of Messiah to come and rescue them from thier enemies etc. The old testament backs this up. There is much less in the old testament about the softer-style Messiah such as Jesus turned out to be. I think in God's wisdom he knew if he sent the "powerful" "save Isreal from thier enemies" type af Messiah most jews would (and so would we) find it very advantages to follow him even if they were not genuine in thier obedience to God. Instead, Jesus came....born in a barn.....riding on a donkey....hanging on a cross.....not very appealing. If a person was a follower of Jesus it must have been genuine because there was often more persecution than advantage at the time. For these reasons the Jews largely rejected him as Messiah and to this day they await the powerful savior type Messiah. They are partly correct in expecting such. If you jump ahead into Revelation prophesies we will find that the Anti-christ will set himself up in the rebuilt Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and demand worship. For all the disobedience of the Jews through history, the one thing they refuse to do is worship anyone other than Jehovah God and will refuse to worship "the beast" in the temple. Things get progressively worse (Armaggedon) until the Jewish people are so distraught they plead and cry out to God for help and ask him to send the Messiah. God does indeed send the Messiah who stands on the mount of olives and proceeds to deliver his people from the evil enemy in a powerfull warrior type fashion.so the prophesies are correct in predicting a powerful , conquering Messiah. The interesting thing here is who does the Messiah look like? He looks exactly like Jesus Christ "the one whom they pierced" and the jews realize thier error of rejecting Jesus who had slipped in earlier as a quieter Messiah. God has always known of the jewish disobedience and for the past couple of thousand years has allowed any of us non-jews to take advantage of the salvation rejected by the jews. These are "the times of the gentiles" which is the period we are now living in. It is interesting to see today, all the fighting in Isreal is centered around the Holy Mount where the Israelies want to rebuild the original Soloman's Temple and re-institute the daily sacrifice.
I would look forward to you comments on my way of interpreting this. Thanks....Arnie
