“The Grand Re-enactment”

“The Grand Reenactment”

By Ty Gibson, from his book, The Sonship of Christ, Chapter 8.

Adapted by Gary L. Clendenon, October, 2021.

As the son of God, the life of Jesus was a complete and faithful reenactment of Israel’s history. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the whole point of the Bible.

Christ passed over the same experiential ground Israel traversed, but He was true to the covenant in place of Israel’s failures. The parallels between the two stories are deliberate and striking.

In the Old Testament, a young man named Joseph had dreams and was sent into Egypt to preserve his family. In the New Testament, another Joseph had dreams and then fled with his family to Egypt—escaping certain death.

When Israel came out of Egypt, God called the nation, “my son” (Exodus 4:22). When Jesus came out of Egypt, God said, “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Matthew 2:15), forging an intentional parallel between the story of ancient Israel and the story of Jesus as God’s new Israelite son.

God’s son, Israel, passed through the Red Sea as they fled from the Egyptian army. The apostle Paul says they were thus “baptized unto Moses … in the sea” (I Cor. 10:2). Directly after being baptized as Israel’s new corporate representative, Jesus was introduced to the world by God with the words, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is relaunching Israel’s history.

Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years … yielding to temptation over and over again, finally entering into the Promised Land of Canaan under the leadership of a man bearing the name, “Joshua,” which means Yahweh saves. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil without ever yielding, before He began to lead humanity into the heavenly Promised Land under the name “Jesus,” which also means Yahweh saves, being the Greek equivalent of “Joshua.”

Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the 10 Commandments from God and then delivered them to Israel. In Israel, Jesus positioned Himself at another mountain, announcing that He had come to “fulfill” the law and magnify its relational significance.

Ancient Israel was composed of the twelves sons of Jacob and their posterity—the “Twelve Tribes of Israel”. Jesus deliberately followed this narrative pattern by calling twelve apostles, from which emerged a spiritual posterity that would become the continuation of Israel, called the church, now composed of all nations.

Israel was called to be “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation,” for the purpose of being a light to all nations, the intent being to incorporate into Israel every people group of the world (Exodus 19:6; Deut. 4:5-8). The church Jesus founded was the new Israel, called to be “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation” (I Peter 2:9), composed of people from every nation, and given the mission of bringing the light of God’s love to the whole world.

So all of that is there in the Bible? Wow! The sheer literary art of the narrative is so breathtaking that it simply cannot be a coincidental production. The chances are so remote as to be impossible.

The truly remarkable thing is that this story invites us to believe the very thing we secretly hope in our inmost hearts to be true—we are the objects of a faithful love that would rather die than let us go. One of the reasons we can know the story of Scripture is true is because it is true to our deepest longings for a quality of love that finds no perfectly satisfying match in this covenant-breaking world of ours. Jesus embodies what we intuitively know we are made for—perfect relational integrity.

Unfortunately, over time, the theological vision of Christianity became so thoroughly saturated in Greek thought by the medieval church, that the distinctly Hebrew orientation toward covenant relationship is almost unknown in modern Christianity.

The Bible is telling us a story. Jesus is the towering, central figure of the story. The goal of the story is that covenantal love would be restored to the human race. Everything that God promised to the world through Israel, God’s unfaithful son, was now brought to pass in God’s faithful son, Jesus Christ.

This, then, is the sense in which the New Testament calls Jesus, “the son of God.”