would be referring to
Messiah ben David,
the ruler at the end of the age at the time of the Third Temple.
The Divine Connection
When answering the question WHO or WHAT is the Messiah, it is helpful to
read what God tells Moses about the divine connection to Messiah.
In Deuteronomy 18:18 God tells Moses:
18 I will raise up a prophet
from among their countrymen like you,
and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all
that I command him. And it shall come about that whosoever will not listen
to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of
him.
As we can see, the Messiah was to be “from among their countrymen” like
Moses. The connection to the divine is that God’s WORDS are put in Messiah’s
mouth. It is important to realize that at no time in history did Judaism
ever assign deity to the Messiah himself.
James D.G. Dunn in his book
Christology in the Making writes:
…there is little or no good evidence from the period prior to Christianity’s
beginnings that the Ancient Near East seriously entertained the idea of a
god or son of god descending from heaven to become a human being in order to
bring men salvation, except perhaps at the level of popular pagan
superstition. [p22]
Why then did Christianity view Messiah as God?