Who Is The Messiah
The short answer
When the New Testament calls Jesus the Messiah, it is answering a question Israel had been asking for centuries. The word means "anointed one" — a king in the line of David, promised by God, who would finally set his people right. This was not a private hope. Israel as a whole was waiting: living under foreign rule, holding onto ancient promises, wondering when God would act. So when Paul stands up in a synagogue in Acts 13 and announces Jesus, he is not introducing a new religion. He is claiming that the long story has reached its turning point — the promised son of David has come.
But the promise was never only for Israel. The royal psalms — Psalm 2, Psalm 72, Psalm 89 — pictured this king's reign stretching to the ends of the earth, bringing justice and blessing to the nations. The Messiah's arrival is good news for the whole world, though it comes first to the people who carried the promise. Asking "who is the messiah" turns out to be asking who Jesus is: not merely a teacher or a moral example, but the rescuing king Israel awaited and the world needed.
And there is a second half to the answer. If Jesus is the true king, his kingship shapes what human life is meant to be. Paul does not present God as an arbitrary rule-maker forcing people onto a bed that doesn't fit them. Instead, in Jesus the Messiah, God has shown what genuine humanity actually looks like. Some ways of living simply cannot coexist with that pattern — not because God is stingy, but because they diminish the people who cling to them. To identify the Messiah, then, is to discover both who rules the world and what it means to be fully, truly human.
What scholars say
In these excerpts, N. T. Wright answers two sides of the question: first, how Jesus, as David's descendant, resolves Israel's long wait for rescue and carries good news to the whole world, as the Psalms had promised; and second, why the Messiah is not an arbitrary rule-giver but God's unveiled model of genuine humanity.
“All was not well: when would God’s purposes finally come true, when would Israel be rescued from her continuing plight? That is the implied question, a corporate as well as an individual problem, to which Paul offers the solution of Jesus the Saviour. It is vital, of course, that Jesus is a descendant of David; this was well known in the early church, and Paul refers to it at the foundation of his ‘ gospel ’ statement in his greatest letter (Romans 1.3). Hidden in the long years of gestation, the promise of a coming Messiah contained, not just a message for Israel, but good news for the whole world, as Psalms like 2, 72 and 89 had always insisted. But the message had to come to Israel first.”
“God isn’t behaving like old Procrustes, the Greek mythological character who put people on his bed and made them fit it either by cutting bits off or by stretching them. Many today imagine that the moral teaching of Christianity is like that, and they grumble against God, or the church, for such an unfair system. Rather, it’s that the creator God has unveiled his genuine model for humanity in Jesus the Messiah , and there are certain ways of behaving which just won’t fit. If you want to be a truly, fully human being, those ways of behaving have to be left behind. Coming on board into God’s kingdom while still being that sort of person is a liability both for the person themselves and for everybody else.”
What it means for you
If Jesus is the Messiah, then the question shifts from "which figure did ancient Israel expect?" to "what does his reign ask of me now?" His kingship isn't a distant theological fact; it's an invitation to live under a rule that is actually good news — first announced to Israel, then flung open to everyone.
It also reframes Christian ethics. The Messiah is not an arbitrary lawgiver but the pattern of real humanity. Habits that clash with that pattern aren't forbidden to spoil your life; they're set aside because they shrink it. Following the king means growing into the person you were made to be.
In context
The first excerpt comes from Paul's sermon in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13, where he retells Israel's story — from the exodus through David — and presents Jesus as the promised descendant of David in whom that story reaches its goal. The second comes from 1 Corinthians, where Paul warns a young church that certain ways of living have no place in God's kingdom. One passage announces who the Messiah is; the other works out what his kingship means for how his people live.