Fulfilled — the word that joins the Testaments

The last word this volume studies is the one that holds its two halves together.

Pleroo — to fill up, to make full, to complete. It is used of filling a net with fish, a house with fragrance, a valley being filled in, and a heart filled with sorrow.

And it is the standard New Testament word for what happens to the Old Testament.

I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill.

Which is a strange thing to say about a body of writing, and the strangeness is the point. He does not say to obey it, or to prove it, or to explain it. To fill it up.

The range of what Scripture calls fulfilled is wide enough to keep any reader honest.

Straightforward predictions are fulfilled — a birth in Bethlehem, out of Micah. But so are things that were never predictions at all. Matthew says the return from Egypt fulfilled Hosea’s line about God calling His son out of Egypt — a sentence about the nation’s history, not a forecast.

The Law is fulfilled by love, Paul says, and by bearing one another’s burdens. Time itself is fulfilled — the time has come, the kingdom of God is near. And Jesus tells John the Baptist that being baptized is proper in order to fulfill all righteousness.

Which is exactly what a volume on the Word of God ends up needing. A thread from Genesis to Revelation is not usually a prediction. The lamb, the blood, the bread, the water, the shepherd, the city — none of those is a forecast. They are shapes that get filled.

And that keeps two errors off the table.

It rules out treating the Old Testament as a book of coded predictions with nothing else in it, which flattens the Law and the Prophets into a puzzle.

And it rules out treating the two Testaments as unrelated, since Luke 24 has the risen Christ saying everything written about Him in all three divisions had to be filled up.

Paul uses the same word for something still going on. He says he was made a servant to fulfill the word of God — to complete or fully carry out the message — among the Gentiles.

And there is a caution in the word for teachers. Because fulfill is broad, it can be stretched to justify almost any connection a reader wants to make between a text and Christ. The discipline is the one from Week Nine: find out what the passage meant to the people who first heard it, and let the filling be shown rather than asserted.

The filling is not finished. It is being done, in rooms and towns and households, by ordinary people who read a book and say what it says.

Pleroo and its cognates occur about a hundred times in the New Testament, and Matthew alone uses the fulfillment formula — this took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet — roughly a dozen times. The range of Old Testament passages he applies that way has generated a large literature and is a genuine interpretive question rather than a settled one.

Scholars usually distinguish several senses: direct prediction fulfilled, typological correspondence completed, a pattern recapitulated, and a promise brought to fruition. Matthew 2:15 quoting Hosea 11:1 is the standard example of the second or third, since Hosea is plainly speaking of the exodus.

Matthew 5:17–18 was studied in Week Six for the smallest letter. The verb fulfill in verse 17 stands over that whole passage, which is why the not-one-stroke claim is not a claim that every ordinance operates unchanged.

Colossians 1:25 uses the phrase to fulfill the word of God of Paul’s own ministry, which some translations render as making the word fully known. Both senses are present, and the ambiguity is productive.

James 2:23 uses the word of a statement rather than a prediction: the Scripture was fulfilled that says Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:6 was not a forecast; James says it was filled out by what Abraham did decades later.

Look it upG4137 πληρόω pleroo, to fill up, complete, fulfill · G2647 καταλύω kataluo, to destroy, abolish · G5056 τέλος telos, end, goal, completion · G4138 πλήρωμα pleroma, fullness

Then read Romans 10:4 — Christ is the telos of the law — where the word can mean end or goal, and translations divide for good reasons. The two words for completion sit at the center of the same question.

Where this touchesMatthew 5:17–18 (Week Six, Day Six) · Matthew 2:15 · Luke 24:44 (Day One of this week) · Romans 13:8–10 · Galatians 6:2 · Colossians 1:25 · Mark 1:15. The earlier word studies were dabar, theopneustos, logos, torah, graphe, emeth, amen, the messenger formula, sepher, edut, imrah, logia, massa, chazon, piqqudim, sod, mitzvah, choq and euangelion.