Many in Israel
believed that their messiah would rise up, sparking and leading a revolution,
and conducting a military revolt that would conquer the Romans and drive them
out of the land of promise, thus ending their God’s curse upon His people and their
long and futile exile. This mindset led to the rise and fall of many
false messiahs, many uprisings, and many needless and fruitless deaths.
Apparently, many had forgotten that their beloved King David, when confronted
with an enemy whose defeat seemed like a hopeless cause, before slinging a
stone and chopping off a head, somewhat ironically stood and said, “it is not
by sword or spear that the Lord saves.”
When it came to
fighting His battle, Jesus, though eschewing David’s particular methods as they
are cataloged in the Scriptural narrative of Israel’s history, did not forget other
words that David was said to have uttered. Thus, as Jesus approached the
place of His battle with His particular enemy, He could join with David and
say, “the battle is the Lord’s, and He will deliver you into our hand” (1
Samuel 17:47b). Ultimately, when His followers and those that came to
believe in His Resurrection came to grasp the significance of that to which
they had been witness, Jesus would be understood to have mysteriously defeated
death, and in so doing ushered in His kingdom in a way unlike that of all of
the kingdoms of the world.
However, rather than
engage in what would have been the customary and expected violence of military
conflict, doing battle with sword and spear as had so many to mixed ends, Jesus
would be the one to suffer violence. In that suffering, He would both literally
and figuratively take all of the blows that His and His God’s enemy could
deliver, and still emerge victorious through a Resurrection.
Truly, in His arrest,
His trial, and His crucifixion, Jesus would prove that the battle belonged to
the one He called Lord. Though on the
surface it seems as if Jesus was delivered into the hands of His enemy, just as
it would have seemed to everybody in David’s day that he was marching forward
to his own destruction and to that which would result in Israel’s subjection to
its enemy, the Lord God of Israel did indeed deliver Jesus’ enemy into His
hands, as it would eventually come to be said of Him that He claimed the keys
of death (Revelation 1:18).
Because Jesus
figuratively took those keys, those that called Him Lord and King came to
believe that death, though still demonstrating its own power in the world,
would no longer have the ability to lock away a people and keep them in exile
from the plans, place, and purposes of their God. Both David and Jesus
would willfully and against all odds engage in battle as representatives for
their people, putting defeat and subjection on the line, and both would emerge
victorious. Their peoples (Israel and humanity) would gain victory in
their victories.
In Jesus’ victory,
all the people of that land (that being the land of Israel) should have
recognized that Israel has a God, and that its God was embodied by and revealed
through their resurrected Messiah King, Jesus of Nazareth. In line with the covenant as expressed to
Abraham and upon which their perception of the world was based, this reality
would be first embraced by Israel, and then shared with the world.
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