The writers of the New Testament regularly point out the ways in which Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies through his birth, his life, his death, and his resurrection. But if you have ever looked up the passages in the Old Testament that Jesus fulfilled, you may have found yourself confused. Sometimes these prophecies aren’t prophecies in the way we expect them. One good example of this is John 19:36-37, which is about Jesus on the cross. When the Roman soldiers went to break Jesus’ legs to speed up his death, they found that he was already dead, so they pierced his side with a spear to make sure. Then John says, “These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: ‘Not one of his bones will be broken,’ and, as another scripture says, ‘They will look on the one they have pierced.’”
Now, there are no prophecies that directly state: “Not one of the Messiah’s bones will be broken” or “When they kill the Messiah, they will look on the one they have pierced.” Those verses don’t exist. So what is John doing in this passage? To answer this question, we must broaden our understanding of what the word “fulfill” means. Though the New Testament authors sometimes use the word fulfill to speak of a prediction or promise about Jesus coming true, more often they mean something more subtle. More often, the New Testament authors use the word fulfill to mean “fill up with meaning” or “bring to its full conclusion.” When Jesus fulfills scripture, most of the time, he is filling that passage of Scripture up with a fuller meaning or bringing a biblical theme to its full conclusion in himself. John 19:36-37 shows us an example of each of these.
When John says that Jesus fulfilled the scripture: “Not one of his bones will be broken,” he is showing that Jesus’ death on the cross brought the scriptural theme of sacrifice to its conclusion. All throughout the Old Testament, lambs and goats were sacrificed as substitutes for the sins of God’s people. One of the most important places this theme comes up in the Old Testament is in the Passover meal, where the Passover lamb was killed as a substitute for the firstborn sons of the Israelites. John made the connection that Jesus is this sacrificial Passover lamb right in the first chapter of his Gospel when he quoted John the Baptist declaring, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
The truth that Jesus’ bones were not broken on the cross is a part of the fulfillment that Jesus brings to this biblical theme. When God gave the instructions for the Passover, one of the commands he gave was, “Do not break any of the bones.” (Exodus 12:46). Jesus was the perfect spotless Lamb of God, whose bones were not broken, but whose blood was shed to bring redemption from our slavery to sin.
The other fulfillment that John speaks of in John 19:36-37 gives us an example of an Old Testament passage that Jesus fills up with meaning so that we can understand it more fully if we read it in light of what he has done. “They will look on the one they have pierced” is a reference to Zechariah 12:10, which says,
And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.
In this passage, God is speaking to the Jewish people about a future day when they will repent of their rejection of and rebellion against him. The “one they have pierced” is God. He has been pierced (perhaps metaphorically) by the rejection and rebellion of his people. In the historical context, the passage certainly does not seem to be about the Messiah being pierced with a spear on the cross. At least, not at first.
Notice, however, that the pronoun changes suddenly in the middle of the sentence. “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.” (emphasis added). If the me is God, who is the him? Hebrew poetry does occasionally switch pronouns as a stylistic device, so it could be an unimportant difference. However, there are hints in the broader context that the change is significant.
In the earlier chapters of Zechariah, God had promised to send his Messiah to reign as King in Jerusalem (see, for example, Zechariah 9:9 “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”) Zechariah 12:10 shows that God’s people would rebel against him by rejecting his Messiah. They pierced God by piercing and killing his Messiah. And because Jesus is not merely a human Messiah, but God’s Son and one with his Father (John 10:30), we can even say that God was literally pierced when the Messiah was pierced. The me and the him are, in fact, one and the same.
There is one more difficulty in comparing John 19:37 to Zechariah 12:10. In John, a Roman soldier pierces Jesus, but in Zechariah, it is the Jewish people who have pierced the Messiah (and God). This difficulty can be answered in a couple of ways. First, the Jewish people rejected Jesus and handed him over to be crucified, so while they didn’t pierce him themselves, the emphasis is on their rejection of God’s Messiah, which led to his death.
Secondly, in both passages, the emphasis is less on who pierced the Messiah and more on the result of that piercing. Zechariah 12:10 begins with the promise that God will pour out his Spirit on the inhabitants of Jerusalem so that they are able to realize what they have done by rejecting God and his Messiah. As a result, they will repent and mourn. After a few verses describing the depth of the mourning, chapter 13 picks up with the result of their repentance: “On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.” When God’s people mourn over their sins of rejecting God and killing his Messiah, they will be washed from their sins, as someone washes in a fountain.
John, in his Gospel, picks up on this and says the fountain that cleanses us is the blood of the Messiah. When the soldier pierced Jesus’ side, “a sudden flow of blood and water” came from the wound (19:34). This was the proof that he really was dead, but it is also the symbolic fountain that washes away our sins. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb protected the firstborn sons of Israel, the blood of Jesus, the pierced lamb of God, washes away the sins of the world—for anyone who puts their faith in him, whether Jewish or Gentile.
We may wish that the Bible was a bit more simple, especially when it comes to the prophecies about Jesus. But then we would miss out on so much richness and depth. When the Bible confuses you, don’t give up, keep digging and let the depth and glory of God’s Word astound you.
