Jesus
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C. S. Lewis has summed it up this way: “Unlike His first coming, Jesus’ second coming will be with power and splendour. The Bible states that everyone will see Him, and everyone will appear before Him in judgement. Simply put, He will confront every person and pronounce his or her destiny.”86
The return of Christ is presented by the Second Testament authors with various rich metaphors. One is the new creation being born from the womb of the old creation.87 Another is the marriage of the new heavens and the new earth.88 Another is the kingdom of God triumphing over and swallowing up all other kingdoms.89
Still another is drawn from the Roman imperial world of Caesar. The Greek word parousia is one example. When Caesar was away on a journey and he returned, his royal appearing—his imperial return to the city—was called the parousia. Caesar’s followers would go out to meet him and welcome him back to the city.
Paul used this exact language and imagery when he spoke of Christ’s return in 1 Thessalonians 4. Paul talked about meeting the Lord in the air, and how God will bring with Jesus those who have died with Him.90 Putting all of the texts together on the subject, the scenario of Christ’s return perfectly fits how the Romans and Greeks understood the word parousia. Jesus will appear, the resurrection will occur, and those Christians who are alive will be transformed “in the twinkling of an eye”91 and meet Jesus in the air. They will then escort Him down from heaven to the newly recreated earth.92
The parousia (“bodily presence,” “appearance,” “revelation,” or “unveiling”) of Jesus on earth draws all of the promises, prophecies, and unfulfilled events in both First and Second Testaments into a whole. They all come rushing together in this amazing event—an event that Luke called the “restoration of all things”—and “heaven must receive” Jesus until it occurs.93
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God’s eternal community has dawned, is dawning, and will one day arrive in its fullness. The God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ will one day bring us into full participation in the grand eschatological community of his divine reign.
—STANLEY GRENZ 94
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In this connection, the First Testament writers would often prophesy an event in the space of a few paragraphs, all of which have elements in them that occur thousands of years apart. So the two-part coming of Jesus, His appearance in the first century and His second coming (which hasn’t occurred yet) are stated as if they are a single event.
THE FEASTS OF ISRAEL
The First Testament prophecies all find their climax in Christ. This includes the feasts (or festivals) of Israel.
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.95
While an entire book could be written on how Jesus fulfills all of Israel’s ancient feasts, here is a brief survey:
• The Feast of Passover 96 was fulfilled in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. (Many scholars believe that Jesus was put to death on Passover.) Paul called Him our “Passover lamb.”97
• The Feast of Unleavened Bread 98 was fulfilled in the burial of Jesus, which marks the transition between the old creation and the new creation—a creation that is marked by truth and sincerity. Our union with Christ in His burial is experienced in water baptism.99
• The Feast of Firstfruits 100 was fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus. He is, as Paul calls Him, “the firstfruits” of those who will be resurrected to life.101
• The Feast of Pentecost (or the Feast of Weeks)102 was fulfilled in the descent of Jesus in the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.103 At Pentecost, Jesus came in the Spirit to live His life in and through His people.104
• The Feast of Trumpets 105 seems to find its fulfillment at the second coming of Jesus Christ, wherein the trumpet of God is mentioned.106
• The Day of Atonement 107 seems to find its fulfillment when the church will be glorified with Christ, the glory of God will fill the earth, and the universe will be saved from the curse.108 While the Passover represents the salvation of God’s people (based on the cross of Christ), the Day of Atonement represents the salvation of the entire cosmos (also based on the cross of Christ).
• The Feast of Tabernacles 109 seems to find its fulfillment in the resurrection of the holy ones (God’s people), which will occur at Christ’s return, when the kingdom comes in its fullness and Jesus judges the world. This is the final harvest.110
• The Year of Jubilee 111 finds its initial fulfillment in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ to set the captives free.112 But it will find its complete fulfillment at Christ’s return, when the earth will be set free from the curse of sin and returned back to its rightful owner.113
While all Israel’s feasts are presented close together in Leviticus 23, the first three feasts are separated in time from the last three feasts. The first three feasts occur during the first month (Nisan), while the last three feasts occur during the seventh month (Tishri). Interestingly, the first three have to do with the Lord’s first coming; the last three have to do with His second coming.
In biblical prophecy, the coming of Jesus is viewed as one event separated by parentheses that stretch from the ascension to His royal appearing at the end of the age. We are now living in the parentheses, wherein we look back to His first coming and anticipate His second coming. Put another way, the kingdom has come and will come. Jesus’ first coming inaugurated the kingdom of God; His second coming will consummate it. So the coming of the Messiah is one event separated by two moments: Bethlehem and the end of the age. The writer of Hebrews included both moments, saying, “So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”114
Indeed, “He who is coming will come.”115
JESUS’ SECOND COMING
In Scripture, the word salvation means “deliverance” and includes three tenses: we were saved (justification = salvation from the penalty of sin); we are being saved (sanctification = salvation from the power of sin); and we will be saved (glorification = salvation from the presence of sin). Salvation, then, is Jesus Christ: Christ as our righteousness (past); Christ as our sanctification (present); Christ as our hope of glory (future).116 The latter will occur when Jesus “will appear a second time.”117
In this way, Jesus will complete what He began at His first appearing. He will end the exile. He will complete the exodus. He will bring His people and His good creation into its full rest. He will bring forth peace, justice, and prosperity to the entire world.
If we know nothing else about biblical prophecy, we know this: the fulfillment fleshes out the details. Christ’s first coming contained many surprises, even among those who studied the prophecies of the First Testament. We believe the same will be true for His second coming. It will contain surprises for even the most learned biblical scholars. In this regard, we agree with Karl Barth, who said, “We can’t fathom the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and we stammer when we try to speak of it.”118
In Philippians 3:20, Paul told the believers in Philippi that their “citizenship is in heaven.” The meaning is not that their destination was heaven. Philippi was a Roman colony. Most of the Philippians were Roman citizens. Their destiny, therefore, was not Rome. The function of a Roman colony was to bring the culture of Rome to the city of Philippi. Thus Paul’s word to the Philippian Christians was this: “Bring the culture of the heavens to earth.”
So our calling as disciples is to labor for the kingdom of God by announcing in the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus of Nazareth is Savior and Lord in both word and deed, praying and living that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and holding in our hearts the words of Paul and John: “Maranatha . . . Come, Lord Jesus!”119
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The Jesus Spirit
“HAVE THIS ATTITUDE IN YOURSELVES WHICH WAS ALSO IN CHRIST Jesus,” Paul exhorted the church in Philippi.1 So what is the attitude of Christ Jesus, the very Son of God, that Paul was talking about? What is a Jesus spirit? What is a Christ attitude?
It’s the attitude of thinking of others more than and above oneself. Paul was reflecting from prison on how Jesus’ spirit was of such humility that He thought of you and me as more important than Himself.
Whoa! Now, that’s humility.
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He lay in the crib so that you might stand at the altar.
—SAINT AMBROSE 2
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At the same time, Jesus exudes an air of assurance. Throughout this theography we have seen how confident Jesus is of His identity—the Son of God. To pick almost at random one more such incident: Jesus and the disciples took a shortcut through some grain fields one Sabbath. The disciples were hungry, so Jesus plucked some ears of grain and began passing them around. Some Pharisees saw what He did and recoiled in horror. Here is Jesus’ response:
[Jesus] said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat? . . . Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ’I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”3
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What a chimera then is man. What a novelty. What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the pride and refuse of the universe.
—BLAISE PASCAL 5
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“Greater than the temple”? “Lord” of the Sabbath? Another “David”? You can’t get more confident than that. Yet unlike the Pharisees, Jesus gave no sense that He breathed purer air than the rest of us.
Humble confidence.
You can feel this Jesus spirit in His invitation, “Learn from me, because I am meek and humble in heart.”4 A humble and meek Messiah? Talk about the ultimate oxymoron. So strange and foreign to Jesus’ hearers that some scholars have argued that the first followers of Jesus invented the concept of humility. The Greeks and Romans did not have a word for humility and despised the very concept.
John Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 127 presents the model disciple as someone in motion with a “composed and tranquil mind.”6 The key to a Jesus spirit from a biblical perspective is the embodiment of paradoxical qualities: simultaneity of strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, singularity and typicality, confidence and humility. Humility is what keeps confidence from going off the rails and becoming arrogance.
JESUS’ GROWING AWARENESS OF HIS MESSIAHSHIP
Our theography ends with a brief exploration of Jesus’ self-awareness as it relates to His messiahship and divine sonship. Contrary to the opinions of some, Jesus did not immediately know that He was “the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” as Peter declared Him to be. He did, however, grow into that awareness, and He was not confused about it.
By the age of twelve, Jesus knew that God was His Father.7 The gospel of John makes clear that Jesus didn’t see Himself as a “Son of God” in the general sense that all children of the Creator are sons and daughters of God. Instead, He understood Himself to be the Son of God in a unique and decisive way. Calling Himself “the only begotten” (or “one and only”) Son as well as habitually calling God “Abba” (a term that children used to address their fathers) are examples.8
When Luke wrote that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men,”9 the first part (“grew in wisdom and stature”) means that Jesus grew in age and height. In other words, He developed as all humans develop. This, of course, would include His memory and self-awareness. Part of that awareness was the consciousness that He was the incarnation of the second person of the triune God.10 His words, “Before Abraham was, I AM,”11 are just one example. By age thirty, Jesus had a high self-awareness and a clear Messianic self-understanding.12
Jesus’ favorite term for Himself is an odd expression: “Son of man” or “Son of Adam” or “the human one.” This phrase occurs eighty-two times in the Gospels. Jesus used it in two ways. It means “I’m one of you,” or “I’m a man just as you are” or “I’m human too.” But then it can also mean something much more glorified. The Son of man is also the One who looks like a man but who will come in the clouds in glory and wisdom and power. The very phrase is an oxymoron of humility and confidence, effacement and exaltation.13
The statements Jesus made about Himself are so lofty that they have given rise to the “trilemma” best summarized by C. S. Lewis in a BBC radio talk: Jesus was either “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord.” Other people have defined the trilemma as “Mad, Bad, or God.”
THE JESUS STORY REVEALED THROUGHOUT SCRIPTURE
The claims of Jesus give us insight into the humble confidence, the lowly certainty, the quiet resolve that marks the life of a perfect man whose life is given over to God. They also reveal how the Jesus story recapitulates and replays the major biblical dramas and narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jesus story is a tightly bound sequence of actions that move toward a climax and resolution. But each twist and turn of the story is scripted by the Hebrew story. The history of Israel is His story. Or as R. T. France has put it:
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All Scripture testifies of me.
—JESUS 14
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Thus he [Jesus] uses persons in the Old Testament as types of himself (David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jonah) or of John the Baptist (Elijah); he refers to Old Testament institutions as types of himself and his work (the priesthood and the covenant); he sees in the experiences of Israel foreshadowings of his own; he finds the hopes of Israel fulfilled in himself and his disciples; and sees his disciples as assuming the status of Israel; in Israel’s deliverance by God he sees a type of the gathering of men into the church. . . . In all these aspects of the Old Testament people of God Jesus sees foreshadowings of himself and his work. . . . Jesus saw his mission as the fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures; not just of those which predicted a coming redeemer, but of the whole sweep of Old Testament ideas.15
In sum, what Torah is to Judaism, and the Qur’an is to Islam, Jesus is to Christianity.
David
Let’s start with the story of King David, warlord and wordsmith—the one whom Bono calls “the Elvis of the Bible.”16 Jesus’ story replayed David’s story.17 Born of David’s earthly lineage, born in “the city of David” (Bethlehem), Jesus was promised the throne of David.18 Others called Jesus “the son of David”—a Messianic title.19 In the Hebraic mind, the son of a person was the reappearance or continuation of that person. Thus when Jesus was called the “son of David,” it meant that David was present in and through Jesus. He was, in effect, David in another person.20
Jesus understood His connection with David when He invoked David’s “unlawful” eating of the showbread in His sharp reply to the Pharisees.21 Jesus was the full embodiment of the “man after God’s heart” whom the Father chose to rule Israel. David wished to build God a house, and God in turn promised He would make a house for David—meaning a “family.”22 The Jews believed that God would establish His kingdom through David and His royal lineage. All of this is exactly what came to pass in Jesus, the true David. (We have sketched many other allusions
to David in Jesus’ life throughout this book.)
Adam
Jesus was also aware that He was “Son of man.” This is a direct reference to Daniel 7, but the title means “son of Adam.” Thus Jesus also saw Himself as the new Adam, which is how Paul portrayed Him (see chapter 4). Craig Keener points out that “Son of man” can be translated “the human one.”23 Jesus knew that as the Son of man, He who would suffer, die, and rise again.25 In addition, Jesus saw Himself as the reality of the temple (see chapter 2), the reality of the Sabbath, (see chapter 2), the reality of creation (see chapter 2), and the reality of Israel (see chapter 7).26
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The living Christ still has two hands, one to point the way, and the other held out to help us along.
—THOMAS WALTER MANSON 24
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On top of all this, Jesus saw Himself as the manna that came down from heaven to feed Israel in the wilderness.27 He saw Himself as the Lamb of God, which gave the people of God the strength to leave Egypt by eating it and saved them from death by the shedding of its blood.28 He saw Himself as the Tree of Life and the flowing river in the garden of Eden.29 He saw Himself as the new Solomon,30 the new Moses,31 and the new Elijah.32 He also saw Himself in some of Jonah’s story.33
From the lips of our Lord Himself:
• “For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”34
• “Someone greater than Jonah is here.”35
• “Someone greater than Solomon is here.”36
• “There is one here who is even greater than the Temple!”37
The book of Hebrews makes clear that Jesus is the reality of the priestly king Melchizedek—“having neither beginning . . . nor end of life”—who gave Abraham bread and wine.38 He is also the new Aaron, the real High Priest.39 He’s also the new Joshua, who brings God’s people into the rest of God.40