As we ponder what has been accomplished by our Lord’s death and Resurrection, and as we continue to imagine the strength and confidence for His mission that Jesus would have gained through His study and exploration of the Scriptures, we go on to read “You rescue Me from a hostile army” (Psalm 18:43a). For Jesus, this involves a two-fold application. Though in the natural He was not rescued from a hostile army---that being the Roman army---by being raised up from His grave, He was rescued from death and its vengeful hordes. By going into the curse of death on a cross as the singular representative for His people Israel, we can see that Jesus took yet another aspect of the Deuteronomic curse upon Himself.
In Jesus’ day, the Roman cross was the symbol of Rome’s power of death over the lives of its subjects; and of course, because Israel was still in subjection to a foreign power, they still correctly considered and understood themselves to be in exile and under God’s cursing. In the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, for violations of His covenant with them, God promised to His people to “raise up a distant nation against you, one from the other side of the earth as the eagle flies” (28:49a). Now, numerous nations had carried the eagle as a symbol, and the eagle was also the symbol of Rome’s Senate, its people, and of imperial Rome. It is said that approximately twenty years prior to Jesus’ birth, King Herod the Great placed an eagle, in deference to Rome, over an entrance to the Temple. For multiplied reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it reminded the people of Rome’s domination (and God’s cursing) as well as passages such as that of Deuteronomy above, this offended the people of Israel.
So through an understanding of the power that was symbolized by the cross, along with the eagle in conjunction with Rome’s military might, as well as the Psalmist’s insistence in regards to rescue from a hostile army, we can make a realistic analysis and re-construction of Jesus’ mindset as He considered His role in regards to the establishment of the kingdom of heaven, on behalf of His people and the world. While He did not rise up to conquer Rome (as was expected of Israel’s messiah), by being raised up from the dead after having been put to death on the Roman cross, He was rescued from that which represented the oppressive subjection of the world’s power, which was the cross. Not only that, it must also be said that Jesus went directly into that which His own people saw as a representation of being accursed by God, which was being hung on a tree (a cross), that He traversed death in the grave, and that he came out the other side, completely vindicated by God’s power and faithfulness.
With that vindicating Resurrection from the grave, the Apostle Paul writes that Jesus “was appointed Son-of-God-in-power according to the Holy Spirit” (Romans 1:4a). Paul indicated that this man that had been subject to a violent and gruesome form of death in which the world’s power clearly overcame Him in a way that was visible to all people, had come out the other side of death and was now in the position of true power. His Resurrection from the form of death that represented the power of death over life, showed the world that Jesus now had the power of life over death. It vindicated His claims as Israel’s Messiah. Now, Paul says that all that was said to be true of that messiah must now be said to be true of Jesus.
Not only was He the Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, and King of Israel, He was also the One in Whom Israel’s God Himself had entered into history in order to vindicate His people, inaugurate His kingdom on earth, and begin to set to rights His world that had been marred by sin and death’s corruption, doing so by the power of the Resurrection, which was the power of the age to come now breaking in upon creation. This breaking in of God’s power and plans for His creation had been foreshadowed by Jesus’ life and His miracles, but was now going to be made manifest because of His death, and by the miracle of His Resurrection.
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