IT'S NEVER A GOOD IDEA to make a biblical case for something—especially something as monumentally important as the mission of the church—from just a few texts. The Bible isn’t just a potpourri of pithy sayings from which we can pick up a nugget here and a nugget there. No, it’s a grand, sweeping, world-encompassing story that traces the history of God’s dealings with mankind from very beginning to very end. If we really want to understand what God is doing and what he would have us to do as his people, we need to have a good grasp of what that story is, what its main themes are, what the problem is, what God’s remedy to the problem is, and what it all looks like when the story ends.
Though we started this book with a look at some specific texts, our thesis—that the mission of the church is to proclaim the gospel and make disciples—does not rest on the Great Commission texts alone. Rather, we believe that those texts are so important and have gained their nicknames precisely because the entire story line of the Bible presses forward toward them.
The way to understand the Bible’s story from beginning to end is actually to start at the middle, with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Have you noticed that the Gospel writers, though they tell the story of Jesus’s life and teaching with different events and different perspectives, all bring their accounts to a climax with Jesus hanging on the cross, dying, and then rising from the dead? It’s been said that all four of the Gospels are really passion narratives with extended introductions!1 That’s probably a bit of an overstatement, but the point is well taken. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ stand indisputably at the pinnacle of all four Gospels.
The same thing could be said of the Bible as a whole. The crucifixion-resurrection, after all, isn’t just one event among many in the life of Jesus. It’s the event to which the whole Old Testament looks forward. From God’s making of animal-skin clothing for Adam and Eve, to the sacrificial system under the Mosaic Law, to the representative suffering of Israel’s king, to Isaiah’s prophecy of a Suffering Servant of the Lord, to Zechariah’s prophecy of a Stricken Shepherd, the Old Testament longs for its fulfillment in a King who would suffer, die, and triumph.
But why? Why do the Gospels focus so squarely on the death of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection? Why do the Law and the Prophets point so relentlessly toward the death of the Messiah? And for that matter, why do the apostles say such counterintuitive and dangerous things as “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2)? The answer to that question, we think, lies in understanding one question that stands at the very heart of the Bible’s story: How can hopelessly rebellious, sinful people live in the presence of a perfectly just and righteous God? It would be easy to answer the question, How can righteous people live in the presence of a righteous God? or even How can sinful people live in the presence of an indifferent God? But the question of how sinful people can live in the presence of a righteous God is not easy at all—especially when the Bible itself tells us that “he who justifies the wicked . . . [is] an abomination to the LORD” (Prov. 17:15; see also 24:24). In fact, we think that is the question that drives the entire biblical narrative from start to finish. It defines the original purpose of creation, it describes the problem that threatens to destroy us all, it calls out for the remedy of the gospel, and it points forward to the grand conclusion of it all, when the riddle is finally and fully solved and God’s people live in his presence forever.
Now, just for clarity’s sake (and for those of you who skim books instead of reading them!), let’s just jump to the conclusion before we even make the case. If this understanding of the Bible’s story line is correct—if it is above all the story of how God has created and is creating a redeemed people who can receive the good gift of living in his presence, both now and for all eternity—then it should not surprise us in the least that Jesus would end his earthly ministry by telling his disciples, “You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). It shouldn’t be surprising that he would launch them into history with the command, “Go . . . and make disciples” (Matt. 28:19). After all, that’s exactly how the great riddle is solved: sinful people are brought into God’s presence by becoming disciples of Jesus through faith and repentance, and they can do that only through the witness of the apostles as they proclaim the good news about who Jesus is, what he has done, and how we should respond as a result.
The basic structure of the Bible’s narrative seems to unfold in four broad acts: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. It starts with the creation of mankind in perfect relationship to God, continues with humanity’s fall into sin, proceeds with God’s plan of redemption for sinful people, and ends up at the glorious consummation (that is, the completion, the culmination, the perfection) of God’s reign over his redeemed people.
Creation
The Bible begins with the unambiguous statement that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Because God created everything, he rules everything (see Deut. 10:14; Job 41:11; Ps. 24:1; 115:3; etc.). That includes us as human beings, who were created as the crowning act of God’s creation and designed as his image bearers (Gen. 1:26–27). We are creatures; he is the Creator; and that fact sets the stage for the entire history of humanity.
A number of authors have begun to argue that mankind is really just one part of God’s vast creation, and that man in fact derives his significance from being part of that creation.2 So, it’s said, God loves creation, and therefore he loves humans. God will redeem the whole of creation, and therefore mankind will be redeemed. The Bible’s teaching, though, seems to move in the opposite direction.3 Priority in both curse and redemption rests on humans, not on creation. Thus God tells Adam that the ground is cursed “because of you” (Gen. 3:17), and Paul says in Romans that when creation is set free from its curse, it will be by means of its being caught up in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).4 The freedom belongs to the children of God; the creation shares in that freedom.
Why did God create man? Most importantly, humans were originally created to live in perfect fellowship and harmony with God. Unlike any other creature, man is made “in [God’s] image and likeness,” which at the very least entailed a unique relationship with him.
Besides living in fellowship with God, Adam and Eve were also to rule over and care for creation as God’s vice-regents, having “dominion” over it. They were given the whole creation to rule, not of course by abusing and tyrannizing it, but instead by “work[ing] it and keep[ing] it” (Gen. 2:15).5 The authority they had over creation, however, was not absolute. It was an authority derived from and subject to God’s own rule over the creation. Yes, Adam and Eve would “have dominion” over the fish of the sea and birds of the air, but they would exercise that dominion as servants of God himself. God was the High King; they were only the stewards. Just as an ancient Near Eastern king might be said to be the “image” of his pagan god—that is, to represent the god’s majesty and authority to his subjects—Adam represented God’s authority to the world over which he was given dominion.
In the “very good” world that God created, therefore, human beings occupied a unique and privileged position. Not only were they to rule the world under God’s ultimate authority—serving as his vice-regents—but they were also to stand in a relationship with him as no other creature in all creation. They were to be as his sons, living and walking with him in perfect fellowship.
Fall
And then, of course, it all went wrong.
Genesis 3 tells the tragic story of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God, earning his wrath as well as exile from his presence. God had warned them from the very beginning that there was one tree out of all the trees in the garden that was not theirs. Their authority to rule and subdue did not extend to that tree. In fact, that tree was a stark reminder that their authority was not absolute, that there was One to whom they themselves were accountable and who had the right to command them.
That is why Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit was such a tragic sin. It was not simply that they violated some arbitrary statute that God had put in place for no good reason. Rather, by taking the fruit, Adam and Eve thought—as the Serpent said—that they could “be like God” (Gen. 3:5). They were grasping for more power and more authority than God had given them. Discontent with their exalted place in creation as his image bearers, they attempted to take what was not theirs and to challenge God’s authority and rule. In essence, by eating the fruit, they fomented a rebellion against God and made a declaration of independence.
When God told Adam that he could not eat of that one tree in the middle of the garden, he explained to him in no uncertain terms: “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). It’s clear from the way the story unfolds that what God meant there was not just physical death. After all, when Adam sinned, he didn’t die immediately—not physically anyway. The death that Adam experienced was first and foremost a spiritual death. Because Adam failed to guard the garden (and his wife), because he allowed Satan to enter the scene and speak unchallenged, and because he failed to trust God’s promises and purpose, the loving son-father relationship between Adam and God was severed.
It’s important to recognize that the relationship Adam broke was not one between equals. It was the relationship of creature to Creator, of vice-regent to Ruler, steward to King. And as a result, it has not only a relational and emotional element, but also a legal and moral one. That’s important to understand, because if we fail to understand the nature of the breach, we’ll misunderstand the story of the entire Bible.
All this is driven home most pointedly in the last verse of Genesis 3: “[God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (v. 24). It was a crushing penalty for Adam. God would not take his physical life immediately. But he would immediately cast him out of Paradise and out of his presence, closing the way back to life with the flaming sword of an angel.
Summary
And so the first and second acts have ended, and the stage is set for the rest of the biblical story. Even though this is one of the most familiar parts of the biblical story line for many of us, it’s important to pause and make sure we see some key things.
First, and most importantly, the prime problem that the Bible sets up in its first three chapters is the alienation of man from God. To be sure, there are enormous consequences that follow from man’s sin and alienation from God. Relationships between human beings themselves are disrupted. God tells the woman, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16), indicating that she will sinfully desire to master her husband (cf. Gen. 4:7), and he will sinfully tend to dominate her. God also tells Satan that there will be “enmity between [his] offspring and [the woman’s]” (Gen. 3:15), the result of which will be strife not only in the family but throughout society (see Gen. 4:8, 23). Moreover, the created order itself is affected by Adam’s fall (Gen. 3:17). No longer will the soil willingly yield its fruit to Adam. Now he will have to work for his food, and work “in pain,” God tells him, and “by the sweat of [his] face.”
In the midst of all this suffering, though, we must remember that all these tragedies—the alienation of man from his fellow man, and the alienation of man from his world—are symptoms of the underlying problem, the alienation of man from God. It was Adam’s decision to rebel against God that precipitated all the rest. Twice God makes this point in the curse he pronounces over Adam:
Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree . . .
cursed is the ground because of you. (Gen. 3:17)
The fundamental problem, the one at the root of all the others, is man’s severed relationship with God.
Second, we should notice that even in the first dreadful moments after Adam’s sin, the hope of salvation is not for Adam to work to return the world to its original “very good” state, but rather for God to effect salvation through a Mediator. In the midst of all this postfall bad news, the first hint of any “gospel,” any good news, comes in Genesis 3:15. There God promises Satan that the woman’s Offspring “shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” That is a poignant description of Christ’s victory over the Serpent, once you know the end of the story. Satan does indeed bruise Christ’s heel (a wound, but not a finally fatal one), but Christ bruises Satan’s head, crushing it by his death on the cross and his resurrection. That’s how God would bring about salvation.
Again, there is nothing in the early chapters of Genesis that would lead us to believe that the work of returning the world to its original “very good” state falls to Adam. God does not give him such a charge, and the reason is that Adam has already blown it. To be sure, his original mandate was to protect the garden and “cultivate” it, even to build from it a society that would perfectly glorify God. But he utterly failed at that task. When God exiles Adam from Eden, it is not with a commission to continue the work of building the world into a God-glorifying, cultivated paradise. Adam’s existence in the world would not be one of continual progress toward godliness anymore; it would be one of frustration and painful work in a world that was now reluctant and even hostile toward him. No, the work of fixing the disaster fell to another, to the Offspring of the woman who would crush the Serpent’s head.
Third, these themes of alienation from God and salvation by a Mediator are central to the whole story line of the Bible. From Genesis 3 to Revelation 21, the Bible is the story of how a gracious God who is also perfectly just and righteous acted to bring sinful human beings back into his presence and favor. It is the story of how God justly and righteously lifted the flaming sword of Genesis 3:24 and reopened for his own people the way to the tree of life. It is therefore to the act of redemption that we now turn.
Redemption
The story of how God redeemed a people for himself, making them able once again to dwell in his presence and under his kingdom, is not a short one. It begins in Genesis 3 when God promises the coming of One who will crush the Serpent’s head, continues with God exiling Adam and Eve from the garden, and does not end until a redeemed humanity stands before God’s throne, enjoying the great blessing of living in his presence yet again. As Revelation 22:4 puts it so gloriously, “They shall see his face!”
From Adam to Noah—The Progress of Sin
As the years pass after the fall, it becomes clear that humanity is not making its way back to faithfulness to God. The story of Genesis 4–11 is one of continual descent into greater and deeper sin. By the beginning of chapter 6, the wickedness of mankind has become rampant: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). The earth was “filled with violence” and was itself “corrupted,” for “all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth” (Gen. 6:11–12). One wonders whether Adam, watching all this take place around him, recognized what his sin had done. The Bible tells us he lived 930 years, which means, fascinatingly, that he would have lived long enough to bounce Noah’s father on his aged knee! Did Adam connect the growing wickedness around him to his own sin? Did he pine all his life for the joys of Eden, for the fellowship he enjoyed with God before his sin? The Bible doesn’t say.
Even after the great flood, through which God rescued the one righteous man—Noah—and his family, the wickedness of man was not stamped out. Sin rears its ugly head again almost immediately with Noah’s drunkenness and Ham’s disrespect of his father (Gen. 9:21–22), and then comes to a head once more with men’s idea that they should build a tower “with its top in the heavens” (Gen. 11:4). This is an act of enormous hubris, a bid to “make a name for ourselves” and to prove that mankind was unlimited in their reach and ability. Seeing mankind’s pride, God judges them yet again, confusing their language and scattering them across the face of the earth.
Despite all this, God has not given up on saving mankind. That is clear even in his covenant with Noah after the flood, when God promises that he will never again destroy the earth with water (Gen. 9:9–17). In fact, God’s intention is even greater than a simple promise not to destroy. He intends to actually redeem humanity and bring them back into fellowship with himself. That intention was hinted at in the promise of Genesis 3:15, and again in God’s saving Noah through the judgment of the flood. The ark that God told Noah to build is a picture of God’s promise that he will bring mankind—by his own saving action—through his judgment against sin.
Abraham
God’s plan to bring humanity back into fellowship with him takes its next great step when God unilaterally promises to bless Abram (later Abraham) and make him a blessing to the world (Gen. 12:1–3). That promise is reiterated over and over again throughout the story of Genesis (13:14–17; 15:4–5; 17:1–14; 18:18; 22:16–18; 26:2–5; 28:13–15; 35:10–12), but the central structure of the promise is contained in chapter 12. Looking closely at that passage, we can see that God is promising Abram three things if he will obey God’s calling.
First, God promises Abraham land. “Go . . . to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). God doesn’t specify here which land, nor does he specifically say that he will give that land to Abram. But the idea is at least implicit, and in Genesis 13:14–17 God makes it clear that this land is to be his gift to Abraham and his descendants. Not only so, but once they are in the land, God says, he will restore fellowship with them:
And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. (Gen. 17:7–8)
That refrain, “I will be their God,” shows up again and again in the story of Israel, declaring God’s intention in this great work of redemption: he will bring the people into the land and cleanse them of their sin. Thus they will be his people, and he will be their God.
Second, God promises Abraham offspring and a great name. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great” (Gen. 12:2). Again, how exactly God will do that is left for later, but the promise is clear enough. Though Abraham is already advanced in age, and though he will take a wife who was barren, God promises that his descendants will be “as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:17). God also tells Abram that he will make his name great—a poignant rejection of humans’ self-aggrandizing desire to “make a name for themselves” at the Tower of Babel. Abraham will not make his own name; God will make it for him.
As is so often the case in the story of the Bible, the true significance of this promise that Abraham will be the father of a great nation will be fully understood only later. The Savior of the world—the one who will finally crush the head of the Serpent—will emerge from Abraham’s descendants. “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring,” Paul tells us. “It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). In other words, the ultimate point and glory of God’s promise to give Abraham “offspring” is not so much that millions of “children of Abraham” will come from him, but rather the fact that the Savior himself will be one of them. As Paul says, all the promises find their fulfillment in Abraham’s “Offspring,” not in his “offsprings.” The true greatness of the nation of Israel is that “from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen” (Rom. 9:5).
Third, God promises that he will make Abraham a blessing. “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3; see also 12:2). As we saw earlier in this book, this is not a commission to go bless the nations, but a promise that blessing will come through Abraham’s offspring (or, following Paul, Offspring). Paul makes this point about the blessing in Galatians 3:8–9: “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.”
Do you see how Paul understands this blessing that Abraham would bring to the nations? He ties it directly to God’s intention to “justify the Gentiles by faith.” The great blessing that Abraham would bring to the families of the earth was nothing other than the blessing of being justified—declared righteous—through Christ.
Moses and the Exodus
God’s plan of redemption continues as he reiterates his promises to Abraham’s descendants—first Isaac and then Jacob. In time, the descendants of Jacob find themselves enslaved in Egypt, and God uses Moses as the instrument of rescuing his people from their slavery to Pharaoh. That event, the exodus of the people from their slavery in Egypt, becomes crucial to Israel’s own self-identity. Time and again, God reminds his people that he is the one “who brought you out of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2), “who brought you out from there with a mighty hand” (Deut. 5:15), and who “stretched out [his] right hand” against the armies of Egypt (Ex. 15:12). Not only so, but the prophets look back on the exodus as a picture of God’s full and final salvation of his people.
Because of this, some have argued that the exodus from Egypt provides a paradigm by which we should understand God’s entire program of redemption. Christopher Wright, for example, has argued that our understanding of redemption, of the gospel, and of the mission of the church should be “exodus-shaped.” In other words, because the exodus from Egypt had political, social, and economic components, we must understand the gospel, redemption, and our mission to have political, social, and economic components as well. There’s a certain compelling logic to that argument, especially since the final salvation of God’s people will certainly include those aspects.
But there are also significant problems with that understanding. Perhaps the most important is that the New Testament writers simply do not treat the exodus in that fashion. In their writings as in the prophets, the exodus does function as a type (or paradigm) of redemption, but typology is not a matter of carrying every aspect of a type over to its antitype. Thus when the New Testament talks about the exodus as a type of salvation, what it focuses on is not at all its political and economic aspects, but rather the picture it provided of the spiritual salvation God was bringing about. In Matthew 2:15, for example, when Matthew ties Jesus explicitly to the redemption of Israel from Egypt, he doesn’t draw out any political or economic implications. Rather, he has already said that Jesus’s mission was to “save his people from their sins,” and now he’s tying the exodus itself to that aim. It’s as if he is saying, “If you think the exodus was a great redemption, you haven’t seen anything yet!” In Ephesians 1:7, too, Paul adopts this language of “redemption”—famously used to describe the exodus—and puts it again in terms of salvation from sin: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.” Similarly in Colossians 1:13–14, the apostle evokes the exodus with the imagery of Christians being taken out of Satan’s kingdom: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Again, the language and imagery of exodus are used to talk not about political and economic redemption, but about spiritual redemption.
So while the exodus does seem to function in Scripture as a paradigm of salvation, we have to be as careful as the apostles were in using it. We should see in the exodus God’s redemption of his people from slavery, and rejoice that he has redeemed us from slavery, too—not slavery to a foreign political power, but slavery to sin. We should also recognize that on the last day, God will indeed set everything—politically, socially, and economically—to rights. And we should rejoice in that certain hope. But we would go beyond the evidence of Scripture—and beyond the practice and writings of the apostles themselves—if we appropriated the exodus in every literal respect as the pattern of our mission in the world. The Gospel writers do not use it that way, the apostles do not use it that way, and we ourselves should not use it that way, either.
Moses and the Nation of Israel
After the exodus from Egypt, God constitutes the people of Israel as a nation and gives them his Law. The central tension in the Mosaic Law, as in the rest of the story of the Bible, is how a holy and righteous God can live among a sinful, rebellious people. It’s a tension that plays out at several points in the story. Even at the moment of the exodus itself, God makes it clear to his people that they are not innocent, and that in fact blood will have to be shed if they are to be redeemed. So God gives them instructions for slaughtering the Passover lamb (Exodus 12). If the people do not obey God, slaughter the lamb, and put its blood on their doorframes, they will be treated in exactly the same way as the judged Egyptians. It is not the Israelites themselves that the angel of death looks for, but rather the blood of the slain lamb.
Even after the exit from Egypt, it is clear that the people are not in a free and perfect relationship with God. They are still sinful people, and as a result they are to remain separated from him. So God tells Moses in Exodus 19:12–13 to set limits around Mount Sinai and forbid the people to go up it or even to touch the edge of it. If anyone does, God says, he will be killed. God may have chosen them and rescued them, but their sin remains and mankind’s exile from Eden is still in effect.
The Law, which God hands down on Sinai and which Moses codifies in the Pentateuch, has been described facetiously as the instruction booklet to a nuclear warhead. That’s an illuminating image! With the God of the universe dwelling among them, Israel is indeed living with something like a nuclear warhead in its midst, and they will have to be very careful about how they deal with him. The sons of Korah and Uzzah both learn the hard way that God is not to be trifled with.
Hence, the sacrificial system. In the Law, God gives his people instructions on how they can atone for their sin and thus not be destroyed by being in the presence of the Lord. Those sacrifices also point to the fact that sin’s penalty is death, and that in order for human beings to dwell with God, that penalty will have to be paid by someone. That is the point, for example, of the scapegoat. Leviticus 16:21–22 describes the practice:
And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.
It isn’t that the goat is released into the wilderness to frolic and play there, as if this were a good thing. No, to be set free in the wilderness is a sentence of death for the animal. Israel’s sins are symbolically transferred to the goat, which dies in their place.
All this, of course, points forward to the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross in his people’s place. Thus the author of Hebrews writes:
For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. (Heb. 9:13–14)
Again, in the story of Moses and the giving of the Law, the central problem being addressed is how a sinful and rebellious people can live in the presence of a holy God. Again and again, Israel pushes that tension to the limit, their grumbling and complaining bringing God to the point of destroying them before Moses intercedes and makes atonement for them. This is no story, certainly, of humanity finding its footing and working to restore the creation to its Edenic state. On the contrary, it is the story of even the chosen people proving that, for all their advantages, they are still unworthy of dwelling in God’s presence and of a gracious and patient God making provision and atonement for them.
King David
The people of Israel eventually demand that God give them a king. God does so, despite the fact that the demand represents a rejection of his direct rule over them. The first king, Saul, turns out to be disobedient and is ultimately rejected by God as king in favor of David, “a man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14). For years, David patiently waits on God to give him the crown, and when that finally happens, God makes some extraordinary promises to him. He promises to make for David a great name (2 Sam. 7:9) and to establish David’s dynasty forever (7:13, 16). Not only so, but he promises David all the same things he has promised Abraham: There’s the promise of land in 7:10, and of offspring in 7:12. True, there’s no explicit mention of blessing to the nations here, but the psalmists and the prophets fill that point out nicely. Thus in Psalm 2, God says to the king,
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession. (v. 8)
And to the nations, the promise is clear: “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”6
You can see what is happening here. All the promises that God made to Abraham, which then passed down to Isaac and Jacob and then to the nation of Israel, are coming to rest in one specific person, the King of Israel. They are finding their fulfillment in and through the one who sits on the throne of Israel. In fact, as God reveals more and more of his plan to them, the prophets begin to see that all those promises will find their final fulfillment—that is, the final reconciliation of man and God will be effected—through the suffering and death of this King as the representative of his people. So in Isaiah, it becomes clear that the coming King of chapters 9 and 11 is actually the same person as the Suffering Servant of chapter 53. The King does not merely rule his people in a kingdom of love and compassion; he actually bears their iniquities so that they may be accounted righteous (Isa. 53:11) and brought back into a perfect and uninterrupted relationship with God.
Of course none of the kings in David’s line live up to those great promises in 2 Samuel. For a time there’s a golden age of peace and prosperity under David’s son Solomon, but Solomon fails to usher in the salvation of God’s people, and he himself falls into sin. The kingdom splits in two under David’s grandson Rehoboam, and the story of the kings then descends into a parade of horribles, with notable exceptions here and there, until the throne of the northern kingdom, Israel, is lost in exile, and the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, watches as his sons are put to death, has his own eyes put out, and is dragged in chains to exile in Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). Yes, the king of Babylon treats him kindly while he’s in captivity, but while there may be some foreshadowing of restoration, it is clearly pity at best, and not awe, that leads the Babylonian king to treat the heir of David in such a way. And that is how the story of Israel’s kings ends . . . at least for a while.
Christ
From its very first pages, the New Testament makes the startling claim that the throne of David is no longer empty. The great promised King who would bring blessing to the nations and who would reconcile sinful man to a holy God has finally come—and he is none other than Jesus Christ. The first words of the New Testament, in fact, are a genealogy tracing Jesus’s descendants back to King David and then further back to Abraham (Matt. 1:1–17). The point, underscored by several fascinating stylistic touches by Matthew, is that Jesus holds a legal claim to the throne of David, and that he fulfills the promises made to that great king and therefore fulfills the promises made to Abraham as well. Indeed, most commentators agree that the division of the genealogy into three sections of fourteen generations each is likely a play on the numeric value of the three letters in the Hebrew word for “David.” Both implicitly and explicitly, Matthew is declaring that Jesus is the long-awaited King, or “Messiah.”
Luke is perhaps even more explicit, recording the angel’s announcement to Mary in no uncertain terms:
And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:30–33; see also 2:4)
Throughout the Gospels, the fact of Jesus’s kingship is emphasized again and again, culminating with the kingly imagery surrounding his crucifixion: the purple robe, the crown of thorns, Pilate’s sign with the inscription “King of the Jews”—all those details are ironic and providential testimony to what really was the case. Though it was not at all what the Jews were expecting from their Messiah, Jesus was in fact King.
It’s important to see that Jesus understood that inherent to his kingship was the salvation of his people from their sin, and thus the restoration of fellowship between them and God. So the angel told Joseph regarding Mary, “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus himself said in Mark 10:45, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And at the last supper with his disciples before his death, he told them regarding the cup, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:27–28). From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus understood that he was drawing together all the strands of the Jews’ Old Testament hope. He was not just the king; he was the King who was at the same time the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, who would bear his people’s iniquities and make them righteous before the Father. Only then could the perfect fellowship of Eden be restored.
That note is sounded immediately upon Jesus’s death, in fact, when the curtain of the temple—the woven screen that separated the people from the Most Holy Place, where God’s presence dwelt—was torn in two, from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51 and parallels). That act of God—the curtain was sixty feet high!—dramatically symbolized the end of humanity’s exile from God’s presence. Now, after so many millennia, they were welcome to enter again into the Most Holy Place. Moreover, the tombs around Jerusalem were opened, and those who had been dead were raised and went into the city (Matt. 27:52–53). It was another indication that the curse of death that had fallen on Adam’s race was now broken.
Of course, the greatest triumph of all over death was Jesus’s own resurrection on the third day. Having suffered and died as the Sin-Bearer for his people, Jesus rose from the dead and conquered death once and for all. And greatest of all, for those who are his people—for those united to him by faith—he broke the curse of Eden and restored fellowship with God. As Hebrews tells us, the risen Jesus now sits at the right hand of God the Almighty, and those who are united to him by faith, too, are even now “raised . . . up with him and seated . . . with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:5–6). Moreover, there is for us who are united to Christ the glorious promise that at the last day, our physical bodies will also be raised, just like Christ’s. As Paul says in Romans 8:11, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
Consummation
After his resurrection, Jesus gave his disciples the charge to go into the world and witness to what they had seen and experienced with and about him.7 In other words, they were to proclaim his kingship and the forgiveness of sins and salvation that were offered through him. That charge given, the Bible tells us that Jesus ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of his Father in heaven, his work of redemption completed (Mark 16:19; Heb. 1:3b; 10:12). Now Christ’s people live in this age under his kingship, enjoying his gifts and bearing witness to him among all the nations of the world. Through their lives together in churches, they bear witness to the life of the kingdom, they encourage one another in faithfulness, and they look forward to the day when their King Jesus will return to earth, this time to fully and completely establish God’s reign on a renewed and transformed earth.
The prophets looked forward to the end of time. Isaiah, as we’ve already seen, told of when the Messiah’s kingdom would be established and said that it would be upheld in justice and righteousness (Isa. 9:7). He went on to tell of God’s promise to create “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17)—a place where the former things will not be remembered (65:17), where the sound of weeping is no longer heard (65:19), where infants do not die and old men do not perish (65:20), where labor will not be in vain (65:23), where the wolf will lie down with the lamb (65:25), and where no one will hurt or destroy in all the Lord’s holy mountain (65:25).
What an amazing vision of the final state of God’s redeemed people! A new, transformed heaven and earth where violence is no more, where sickness is no more, where death no longer reigns, and above all, where God again rejoices in his people. It’s that restored relationship that represents the high-water mark of Isaiah’s vision—not merely the end of violence or the end of sickness, as wonderful as those things are—but the restoration of the relationship between God and his people. No longer are they outcasts and exiles, full of shame and nakedness; now they are “a joy” and “a gladness” to God (65:18). Instead of cursing them, he “will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in [his] people” (65:19). Instead of casting them away from his presence, he will answer them even “before they call” (65:24). “While they are yet speaking,” the Lord exults, “I will hear” (65:24). Finally that great refrain of the Old Testament is fully fulfilled, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
The book of Revelation ends with the same vision of restored relationship, as God’s redeemed people dwell in God’s place under God’s rule. John writes in Revelation 21:1–3:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
Once more, the emphasis is on God dwelling again with man, the enmity between them ended, and the sin that separated man from God forgiven. John even says later that in the eternal city of God, “no longer will there be anything accursed,” and, perhaps most gloriously of all, God’s servants “will see his face” (Rev. 22:4). Whatever curse and division existed between God and man is now completely gone. The curtain is torn, the curse is ended, the separation is closed. Once and for all now, God’s people see his face.
What we’ve seen in this short and admittedly incomplete survey of the biblical story is that the main tension of the Bible’s story line seems to revolve around the question, How can hopelessly rebellious, sinful people live in the presence of a perfectly just and righteous God? Yes, there are other themes and emphases that we haven’t even mentioned here, but that question seems to drive the story at every point. The “whole story” is not, as one author suggests, about us becoming “conduits for him to bring healing to earth and its residents.” It’s not about our call “to partner in a restorative work so that the torch of hope is carried until Christ returns.”8 The story is not about us working with God to make the world right again. It’s about God’s work to make us right so we can live with him again.
Now, understanding that story and its central features, it’s not hard at all to see why Jesus would make his final commission to his disciples the charge to “be my witnesses” and declared that through them, “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Acts 1:8; Luke 24:47). After all, the way for human beings to be reconciled to God—the great burden of the Bible—is by being forgiven of sin and declared to be righteous instead of guilty. And that declaration of righteousness, that justification of the ungodly, would come only through being united to the King who suffered and died and rose triumphantly in the place of his people.
1This phrase was first coined by the nineteenth-century German theologian Martin Kähler about the Gospel of Mark in particular, but he applied it to all four Gospels. See the English translation, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 80.
2For example, "So the earth has intrinsic value—that is to say, it is valued by God, who is the source of all value. God values the earth because he made it and owns it. It is not enough merely to say that the earth is valuable to us. On the contrary, our own value as human beings begins from the fact that we ourselves are part of the whole creation that God already values and declares to be good. We will have more to say about human life in a moment, but the starting point is that we take our value from the creation of which we are part, not vice versa." Christopher Wright, The Mission of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 399; emphasis added.
3See Peter Gentry, "Kingdom through Covenant," Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (Spring 2008): 22–23, for several exegetical arguments that the creation of man is the crowning achievement, the high point, of the creation story.
4See John Piper, "The Triumph of the Gospel in the New Heavens and the New Earth"; available online at http://desiringGod.org.
5Peter Gentry has helpfully shown how Adam and Eve's creation "in [God's] image, in [God's] likeness" points clearly to both of these roles—fellowship and dominion. On the one hand, being created in the "likeness" of God seems to indicate Adam's special relationship of sonship to God. Just as Adam was said to have "fathered a son in his own likeness," Seth, so God is said to have created Adam "in the likeness of God" (Gen. 5:1, 3). The analogy is not exact; there's no teaching here that Adam is the physical son of God. But humans' creation in God's likeness does point to the unique father-like relationship that God intended to have with us. On the other hand, to be created in God's "image," Gentry argues, "indicates that Adam has a special position and status as king under God" (Gentry, "Kingdom through Covenant," 27–33).
6See also Isa. 2:2; 60:3–4; Jer. 3:17; Mic. 4:1–2; Zech. 2:11 and others, where the nations stream to Jerusalem to worship the Lord in the last day. See also Isa. 19:23–25, where "in that day," Egypt and Assyria are astonishingly called "my people" and "the work of my hands."
7On Jesus's Great Commissions, see chapter 2.
8Gabe Lyons, The Next Christians: How a New Generation Is Restoring the Faith (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 55.