“Israel existed at all only because of God’s desire to redeem people from every nation. But in his sovereign freedom he chose to do so by this particular and historical means. The tension between the universal goal and the particular means is found throughout the Bible and cannot be reduced to either pole alone….Now when we consider Jesus in light of this, the vitally important fact is that the NT presents him to us as the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. And the Messiah ‘was’ Israel. That is, the Messiah was Israel representatively and personified. The Messiah was the completion of all that Israel had been put in the world for — i.e. God’s self-revelation and his work of human redemption. For this reason, Jesus shares the uniqueness of Israel. What God had been doing through no other nation he now completed through no other person than the Messiah Jesus. The paradox is that precisely through the narrowing down of his redemptive work to the unique particularity of the single man, Jesus, God opened the way to the universalizing of his redemptive grace to all nations. Israel was unique because God had a universal goal though them. Jesus embodied that uniqueness and achieved that universal goal. As the Messiah of Israel he could be the savior of the world. Or as Paul reflected, going further back, Jesus became a second Adam, the head of a new humanity (Rmns. 4-5, Gl. 3)”
Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament
Put a hour glass on its side. From the left broad end to the middle point where the sand pours though you have the Old Testament with it particularizing motion serving the universal end of making God’s glory known to the nations. As OT redemptive history unfolds the motion becomes, like the hourglass increasingly particular. At the broad end we find the Nation of Israel but eventually that is narrowed down to the tribe of Judah and eventually that is narrowed down to the household of David and that is finally narrowed down to the Messiah Jesus. In Jesus we find the culmination of what it was supposed to mean for Israel to be a Kingdom of Priests unto God.
With the Death of Jesus, the particularizing motion of Scripture ceases and we start reading the NT accounts moving from the narrow to the broad end of the right side of the hour glass. Jesus has accomplished OT Israel’s task and now the nations become to come in. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit falls on representatives of all the household nations. In the book of Acts the broadening of the Gospel is seen in the march of the Gospel from Judea to Samaria to the uttermost ends of the earth. In the book of Acts we see the Spirit fall on the Jews, the God-fearers, and the Gentile Ephesians. What is being communicated here is that now the Church is to be to the nations, under the power of the Spirit, and w/ the commission of Jesus what the Jews were to be the nations in the OT.
The goal in all of this was and is the re-creation work of God whereby, by the power of the Gospel the World repents much the same way that the Assyrians repented under the Gospel ministry of Jonah. If Christ is a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was supposed to be, then following the head and body metaphor, the Church is to likewise be a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was to be. The Church is now the Kingdom of Priests representing the nations to God and her task is to reveal God’s work of re-creation in her midst in a world that still suffers and pursues the Fall’s attempt at de-creation. Just as the first Adam, in submission to his dominion mandate, was to push the garden boundaries so that the garden of the Lord covered all the earth, so the Church has been commissioned again with a dominion mandate (Mt. 28) to bring God’s re-creative Gospel news with the expectation that the glory of the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the ocean.
