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The Second Part of  “Christ fulfills the law.”

The Land of Israel is intimately connected with the tabernacle system.  If you pay attention to where men offered sacrifices in the scriptures after the time of Abraham, it is consistently in the land of Israel.  The land is special and holy to God. God commands Israel in Deuteronomy to set up two stones and write the law on them, then set them up on Mt. Ebal in the holy land.  These were witnesses between the land and the people of Israel.   The Israelites are told in Leviticus 18 that if they sin against God the land would vomit them out.   The land turns against Israel when she sins through famine and through infertility.  If God is going to dwell in the land it must remain holy.

The role of the land in the Old Testament helps us to understand Holy War in the Old Testament.  The Canaanites had thoroughly defiled the land, so God used the Israelites as a judgment against them.  The role of the land also helps us understand why so many sins received capital punishment, especially the reason why idolaters received capital punishment.  If the land was defiled it brought judgment on the whole nation of Israel.  We can think of the sin of Achin and how that affected the entire Israelite community when they attacked Ai.  Achin’s sin had defiled the camp. The sin of the people defiled the land of Israel. The land had to remain pure because God desired to dwell among his people.

To understand Christ’s fulfillment of the land, we need to understand what the kingdom of God is and further on, the church.

Christ comes to inaugurate the kingdom of God.  This is Christ’s opening announcement in the gospels.  The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom.  We can see it visibly in members of the church of Christ, laboring in whatever position God has called them too. But the kingdom is also invisible.  In fact, it is primarily invisible.  It is the work of the Spirit in transforming the hearts of the regenerate so that they love and serve their king.  As Christ says to his disciples in Luke 17: 21, “Nor will they say, “look here it is,” or “it’s over there!” for the kingdom of God is already among you.

In the Old Testament, that kingdom had definite boundaries.  In the New Testament, that kingdom is wherever believers are.  Our king is Christ. Christ is the anchor that keeps us rooted from above.  Christ is the ark according to 1 Peter 3, who keeps us safe in the troubled waters of our own day. We are citizens of heaven.  We cannot defile the land in the same way.  There remains a promise that the saints will inherit the earth, but our orientation to the land is different.  God bound the Jews to the land and the purity of the land.  God binds us together by the Spirit of Christ, as the church of God, to Christ’s body in heaven.

The Jews furthered the kingdom of Israel through obedience to God’s call to holiness so that the nations would be blessed by her.  Christians further the kingdom of God by calling all the people of the earth to become citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

We also need to understand what the church is in order to understand how Christ fulfilled the role of the land.  The church is the gathering of the citizens of the kingdom so that they may worship God.  The Greek word for church is a political word, referring to a gathering of citizens in order to make decisions for a city. The church gathers in Christ.  They come as men and women born of the spirit of Christ.  The purity of the church depends on the purity of her members.

Once again we can ask how the church is to order her life according to God’s law in the Old Testament.  This time his word about the land. The church is called to purity through the use of church discipline.  The church is the gathering of a spiritual kingdom.  That means that she doesn’t use the sword to punish her offending members as they did in the Old Testament.

Rather the church uses spiritual means.  She guards the purity of the church through the preaching of the word. There is a possibility he may have to remove members from the fellowship at the Lord’s Table. She needs to remove those members of Christ, not from the land. This is how the church keeps herself pure. If she does not, it’s not the land that vomits her out, but God.  Think of Revelation 3: 15, where God threatens to vomit out the church of Laodicea if she does not repent.

At the same time, the promise to the church is that she will inherit the earth. God calls the church to wage a spiritual holy war against the lies of this world. We heard that this. She is called to do this in her own midst in order to protect her people.  God also calls her to apply the redemptive work of Christ in rescuing people from the lies of the devil.  Just as the church is the temple of Christ, so the church is the land of Christ, where people can be safe from the wrath of God.

A quick thought:

Even though I would defend multiple levels of meaning of scripture, I want to be careful.  There is a strong insight in the argument that there is only one sense in scripture.  The basic truth behind this insight is that Scripture cannot mean something that is contradictory to its plain or literal sense. Even though we can discern different levels of meaning this does not mean that meaning of scripture is not one. Scripture has one unified message and that is the salvation we all find in Christ.

One of the themes of the book of Proverbs is the hiddenness of wisdom.  In some sense, she is easy to find.  In another sense, it takes time and money to find her.

The important thing to remember is the beginning of wisdom.  In order to find wisdom, you need the right starting point.  That starting point is the fear of the Lord.  Solomon tells us that repeatedly, but particularly at the beginning of the book.  He already tells in the first chapter the seventh verse that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

When you fear the Lord in a sense you already have wisdom, but that is only the beginning. She is out in the marketplace calling in chapter 1 of Proverbe, but approaching her seat is only the beginning.

There is a wisdom to learn within the wisdom that is given.  We have the creation of God.  We have the Word of God.  Both are places where Solomon goes to find wisdom.  In Chapter 8 of Proverbs, Solomon speaks of how God built the foundation of the world with wisdom.  Throughout the book of Proverbs Solomon will talk about lessons he learns from the animals (i.e. go to the ant, you sluggard). One also learns wisdom by remembering the law of their father and mother.  God provides authorities on this earth to give us wisdom.

The ultimate wisdom is “to trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).”   Wisdom begins with the Lord and ends with the Lord. But the goal is not thoughtless submission.  That is clear from all the different things that Solomon calls us to consider.  The goal is deep reflection, deep understanding of the goodness that the Lord has given.

Proverbs is a challenge to listen.  It is a challenge to learn and reflect on the commandments that the Lord has given us; to apply that word so that we may discern between good and evil. Ultimately it is a challenge to search out wisdom, to move from wisdom to greater wisdom.   (It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out (Proverbs 25:2).

In a former post, I argued that we should hold to both a literary reading and a historical reading of Genesis 1.  I argued against those who try to divide these two, either picking the literary reading or the historical reading. Further, when you do this to Genesis 1 it opens the door for people to do it with the gospels. That post is here.

Just today I saw a post on postbarthian.com which argued this very thing.  They argued for the reality of the of the open tomb and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Meanwhile, the gospel accounts were literary (legend-like) accounts of that basic truth.

Again, I want to affirm both the literary and the historical nature of those parts of scripture.  If we affirm literary, without the historical, we begin to argue over what precise amount of theological content can be affirmed from this literary account.  If we affirm both, we have fullness.

A short excerpt from a paper I recently wrote on an article by Robert Jenson.  Here is one way to think about how prayer works.  Prayer is a means in the plan of redemption and it moves along the plan of redemption.

Christians, through prayer, really are involved in providence.

When we understand this within the immutability of God’s decree, we see that God brings all things to be through his good pleasure.  As beings in time, we can be confident in the certainty of God’s immutability; that he will always remain faithful. At the same time, we can, as part of God’s immutable plan, be certain that our prayers are means that truly are significant in God bringing out his plan of redemption.  We can trust this is true, because God is not before us temporally, but is before us as the eternal king.  He is both the beginning and the end.  This means we don’t need to be fatalists.  As Christians, we are living, breathing, free means within the immutable plan of redemption.

A little bit of exposition from Colossians 1:16:

Through Christ, God the Father has created everything.  Paul emphasizes that through the words, “heaven and earth.” In other words, the whole universe.  Also, “visible and invisible.” That means, angels too.  Then he gives us a number of descriptors of things that are created through Christ.  These are “thrones and authorities, principalities and powers.”  These could be human kings and emperors, but they can also refer to angelic powers behind the thrones and authorities.  Paul probably means to include both.  The church, just like the Jews of Paul’s time, is always tempted to give too much value to these created authorities. The fact is, these were created through Jesus.  These powers owe allegiance to Jesus.

We are told later on that, in particular, the principalities and powers have been conquered through Jesus’ death. Colossians 2:15, “Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it,” that is, in the cross.

There is something big going on here.  In the time of the Old Testament, the world was under the guardianship of angels.  In particular, we know that the law of the Old Covenant was administered by angels. Hebrews 2:2, Acts 7: 53 and Galatians 3: 19 all confirm this.  We know from the visions of Daniel in Daniel 7-11 that other nations had their angelic powers (perhaps even demonic powers) as well.   Now Jesus has come.  He has lived under the law that had been established through these angels.  And he has fulfilled that law. He broke the power of that law and supplanted the authority of the angels who administered it.

That means that there is no hierarchy between us and Jesus anymore. We, as sons of God, have outgrown our tutor, the law of the OT, according to Galatians four, and we directly serve our Saviour Jesus Christ. Colossians 2: 14 confirms this, “He has nailed it (the handwriting of the requirements that were against us) to the cross of Christ.   We are no longer subjected to these authorities and powers, but we are directly subjected to Christ through his death and resurrection.  As we are told in the very next verse, “he is the head of the church.”  This means that these powers have no control over the world anymore, not even an intermediary power.

I recently wrote a blog post on telescoping and argued that typology would be a better way of talking about what was to come. I believe I was wrong and I was right.

There is truth in telescoping, in the idea that both author and reader could see beyond the first fulfillment.  I did not need to condemn telescoping.  They could see the greater mountain peak behind the first fulfillment. Perhaps they could even guess at a greater mountain peak behind that one.  In prophetic literature, it is often the Lord himself who gave the prophecy.  The prophet would have seen the fulfillment of the Lord’s words, but as he studied those words it is likely he would have seen the promise of greater fulfillment.

The problem with telescoping is that it is a hermeneutical principle that is limited to prophesy.

I want to propose that both typology and telescoping apply to every genre of biblical literature.  When David writes in Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit down at my right hand,” he wrote because of what the Lord had done in his time and in his life.  At the same time, he guesses at the further mountain peaks, which will fulfill that poetic truth he has written down.  This is not a prophecy, it is a poem.  When Moses sits down and writes down the story of his early life, he guesses at what further things God will do, based on what God has done in his life. Telescoping is not limited to prophecy.  Typology is not limited to narrative.  The Word of the Lord, in whatever genre, allows its readers to guess at what is coming in the future and at the same time to recognize the type when it comes.