Reflections on salvation and justification in the New Testament

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1997 by Carson, D A

3. Christology. As the HB arouses expectations of various complex kinds, it is unsurprising that some people during the period of second temple Judaism expected two messiahs, one priestly and one Davidic. The categories of messianism are so interwoven that it seems an impertinence to introduce them so cursorily here. And yet NT notions of salvation are so dramatically tied to Jesus in his role as the promised Christ, the Messiah, that it would be still less responsible to say nothing.

At the risk of considerable oversimplification, we may discern two axes of personal, "messianic"20 hope in the HB. On the one hand, Yahweh repeatedly promises that he himself will come and rescue his people, be their God, become their Shepherd, lay bare his arm and rescue them, and the like. On the other hand, Yahweh employs various agents who rescue his people or who promise to do so. Here we may think, inter alios, of David, the Danielic son of man, the angel of the Lord, Melchizedek in Psalm 110-not to mention an array of judges, prophets, priests and kings. Yet the two patterns -- one that focuses on God himself, one that focuses on God's agent-develop strange twists.

First, the agent may be tied to God or identified with God in unexpected ways. For example, in Ezekiel 34 God, after saying about twenty-five times that "I" will rescue the flock-that is, that all the human shepherds have failed and that he himself will shepherd the sheep, tend them, and so on -- suddenly says he will place over them one shepherd, "my servant David, and he will tend them" (34:23). Again, in Isaiah 9 readers are told that "to us a child is born, to us a son is given," someone who will reign on David's throne-and yet this Davidic monarch is also called, among other things, "mighty God" (which I take to be the right translation) and "everlasting Father." His kingdom shall continue forever-as will the kingdom of the Daniel 7 figure, "one like a son of man" who approaches the Ancient of Days to receive his kingdom. The angel of the Lord is almost notorious for being alternately identified with and distinguishable from God himself. In the OT, Melchizedek appears in only two passages: Genesis 14 and Psalm 110. From these two passages the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews infers (1) that the textual silence regarding Melchizedek's ancestry and death in Genesis 14, in a book where the genealogy and death of virtually everyone of importance are properly established, is a symbol-laden omission that makes him "like the Son of God," and (2) that centuries later the promise of a priesthood under his aegis signals the principial obsolescence of the Levitical priesthood and thus a prospective change in the law covenant that surrounds the Levitical system. It is against this wealth of OT background that the strongest Christological confessions of the NT are to be understood. In Jesus all the fullness of the Deity resides in bodily form (Col 2:9). The Word is simultaneously with God (i.e. God's own fellow, even in the beginning) and is God (i.e. God's own self)-and this Word became flesh (John 1:1, 14).