As I stated in my last post, in light of redemptive history, the theological argument for uninvented is powerful because of the coherence of the biblical message from Genesis to Revelation. In light of Jesus revealing to us it is all about him in Luke 24, we can see him everywhere. It is impossible apart from the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit for the writers to have had any idea of the ultimate meaning of their words, and thus to have made them up. And I don’t use the word impossible lightly. For much of my Christian life I thought, like most Christians, the Bible was most definitely not made up by the men who wrote it, but at some level thought it could have been. That’s what skeptics have been claiming for 300 years, and that message is everywhere in the suffocating secular cultural air we breathe. My deep dive back into apologetics in 2009 eventually leading to writing Uninvented has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt, in the vernacular, they just couldn’t make that stuff up!
Another example of this impossibility is from a passage in Ezekiel 21 that ingeniously ties back to a passage in Genesis 49, almost as if it was planned by a divine author! Maybe Ezekiel was so familiar with the book of Genesis that he decided to take the passage there and include the same idea in his writing, but that would make Ezekiel a liar. If you know anything about his very difficult life (being a prophet in Israel was a brutal job), you would know he consistently declares, “Thus saith the Lord,” as he does in this passage. We have a choice, as do all people who come to the text of Scripture, when we read of a prophet who claims the Lord told him to declare something. Either it happened, it is true, and the prophet was a faithful communicator of the Lord’s words, or he was a liar. The skeptic can’t say they had dreams or mystical visions, and so just thought the Lord was telling them these things when it was all in their head. That’s not an option over 400 years of the prophetic witness in Israel. Only what I call in the book, a question-begging anti-supernatural bias would prompt someone to think such a thing. If someone comes to the text without the hermeneutics of suspicion, the text reads real, as I also say in the book, with verisimilitude.
Now to the passage. Ezekiel has been speaking to the rulers and leaders of Israel:
25 You profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, 26 this is what the Lord God says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. 27 A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! The crown will not be restored until he to whom it rightfully belongs shall come; to him I will give it.
The obvious question is who is this one or will be this one to whom the crown of Israel, God’s people, rightfully belongs. We have to go back over a thousand years (God is never in a hurry, as I say ad nauseum) to find a clue from Genesis 49. The scene is after Jacob and his family has been saved from the famine in Egypt because of Joseph, and at the end of his life he is telling his sons what will happen to them “in the days to come” (v. 1). That phrase in Hebrew is literally “in the last days,” which if it sounds familiar it is because it is an eschatological Messianic reference as we read in Hebrews 1:2, “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” This passage to Judah is about Jesus, the lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5):
8 “Judah, your brothers will praise you;
your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons will bow down to you.
9 You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
11 He will tether his donkey to a vine,
his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
his robes in the blood of grapes.
As we can see, this one will not only be ruler of Israel, God’s people, per Ezekiel, but also a ruler of the nations. This prophecy is what began the idea of a Messiah, simply an anointed one as were all kings and rulers in the history of Israel. From the time Jacob spoke these words to the time of Ezekiel’s similar words was approximately 1,400 years! That’s a theme with some staying power, and why it had such a hold on Jewish imagination at the time of Jesus. Not to mention why it would be very difficult, I believe impossible, to be a product of man, mere human fiction.
Which raises the question of who this Messiah would be and what he would be like. While there were many differing ideas about it in the intertestamental period (Malachi to John the Baptist), most Jews agreed he would be a Davidic like king who would rule in Israel from Jerusalem and lead them in victory over their oppressors. Even Jesus’ disciples after he was raised from the dead and prior to his ascension (Acts 1), not understanding it all yet asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They like all Jews of the time missed the spiritual part of the equation, that the Messiah’s reign over the nations would be through the transformation of the hearts of his people. Which brings us to the eschatological and how we’re to understand Jacob’s prophecy that the Messiah’s rule would include the “obedience of the nations.”
In the Jewish conception of the first century, Messiah’s rule would be physical and temporal from Israel over the nations in this material world. Once the Messiah led them in military conquest over the Romans, everything would be like it was always supposed to be with the nation of Israel and their king ruling the earth. Unfortunately, they would miss the spiritual significance of the Isaiah 53 Messiah who would redeem his people from their sins. When Jesus rose from the dead, it didn’t take long for them to realize Jesus was in fact the fulfillment of Isaiah 53, as it is worked out in the rest of the New Testament. The question for Christians now would be looking back at these passages, what would the “obedience of the nations” look like going forward.” It’s not an easy question to answer, as we can see from the last two thousand years of Christian history.
Like most Christians, until last year and my conversion to post-millennialism, I saw the answer to that question as purely eschatological, meaning it was for the time after Jesus comes again in judgment and we experience the new heavens and earth of Revelation 21. My tendency was to over spiritualize such passages as if they had no relevance to life in this fallen material world. How could they! Look at how horrible things are. It will only, I thought, take a final, supernatural act of Almighty God in Christ to change things. Otherwise, we’re stuck with things getting worse and worse, or at best staying just the miserable way they are.
Now I am convinced Jacob’s “in the last days” prophecy about this ruler started when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven to reign “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1). These days started at Pentecost, as Peter says in Acts 2, that “in the last days” God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. We by the power of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s body in this fallen world get to be part of God advancing his kingdom and building his church in our day until “the obedience of the nations” is his!
Recent Comments