future of Israel as a theological question, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2001 by Blaising, Craig A

This is the gospel which he says in Rom 1:16 is to the Jew first and also to the Greek. In 2 Tim 2:8, he writes, "Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descendant of David, according to my gospel." Of course, Matthew and Luke also emphasize from the beginning of their Gospel accounts the Davidic lineage of Jesus. In Luke 1:32, Gabriel tells Mary that her son "will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David; and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and his kingdom will have no end."

The Davidic lineage is crucial for understanding the NT reference to Christ as the Son of God, recalling the promise to David in 2 Sam 7:14 concerning his descendant whom the Lord would raise up and whose kingdom the Lord would establish: "I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me." In other words, "Son of God" is first of all a covenantal term designating the fulfillment of the promise to David. The remarkable message of the NT is that in and through this sonship a greater sonship is revealed. Whereas Psalm 72 says that "in him" all the nations will be blessed, applying the Abrahamic promise to the Davidic King, indicating that it would be through the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant that the Abrahamic promise of mediated blessing would itself be fulfilled, Colossians 1 says that "in him" all things were created. The "in him" is the formula of mediated promise. But here it indicates a "him" who is greater that any descendant of David. The point is that the incarnation is not just the union of God and humanity; it is the incarnation of the Son of God in the house of David as the Son of covenant promise. From a human standpoint, Jesus is not just a man, or generic man; he is that man-that descendant of David who has a great inheritance and a future set forth in the eschatological fulfillment of God's plan for Israel. But as God the Son incarnate, those promises are ever more sure and certain, and they also receive a cosmic addition to the inheritance beyond, but not instead of, the initial scope of the promise. Paul goes on to say in Col 1:16 that all things were not only created "in him" but "for him." For him-the Son of God, God the Son incarnate as the covenant Son, the Son of David-as a gift from God the Father. If God the Father has given all things to his covenant Son, the Son of David, precisely because he is none other than God the Son, how could Israel's future be any more secure?

When we think of Jesus Christ, then, we must think of him clearly as the Messiah of Israel. Israel's promises are guaranteed now not only by the word and the oath, as Hebrews 6 says, but by the union of Davidic sonship and divine sonship, the inclusion of the covenanted Davidic inheritance in the inter-trinitarian gift of all creation from the Father to the Son. This is why Jesus is the only way, the only way to partaking of the glorious inheritance of the kingdom for either Israel or the Gentiles, for one can only be blessed by God "in him."