Additionally, one can
rest fairly assured that part of Jesus’ prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane,
before He was made to embark upon the ordeal of the cross, was that His life be
sustained; and that when He went down into death, taking the Creator God’s
cursing and going into exile on behalf of all God’s people (because He is
demonstrated to have understood Himself to be Israel’s Messiah, with all of the
implications of unending rule and kingship associated with that position), that
He be granted the redemption of physical resurrection to new life---the
deliverance from exile---that was the great hope and expectation of
Israel. In union with Him, that same hope that animated much of Israel
belongs to all believers as well.
Moving on to the
fifth verse of this Psalm, Jesus and others would find “Your deliverance brings
him great honor” (21:5a). Similar to the way in which “blessings” would
have carried a specific connotation for the Psalmist, for Jesus, and for the
people of Israel, the use of “deliverance” would have a deliberate reference
attached to it as well. “Deliverance,” when used by the people of Israel
(and most likely the Psalmist as well), pointed to exodus---to
redemption. Again, these words are not to approached apart from their own
terms, and they are certainly not to be informed by twenty-first century
mindsets. The modern observer must take the contextual approach that goes
beyond the use of language, making every attempt to understand the terminology
in its historical, philosophical, theological, political, cultural and social
setting as well, with no disconnect between any of those things.
For Israel, “deliverance”
was deliverance from exile, and along with the memory of the Babylonian and
Assyrian experiences, as highlighted in the historical narrative of Israel and
in the prophets, the Deuteronomic description of exile would have loomed large
in the popular imagination. In the area of deliverance, Israel’s story
includes the story of their covenant God delivering His chosen people from
Egypt. Their God is then reported to have delivered His people from a
variety of oppressors through the time of the Judges.
Enhancing the
understanding of exile and deliverance (or exodus), the record of Judges
demonstrates that exile entailed much more than simply Israel being away from its
land. The idea of exile included the Creator God’s people not ruling
themselves in their own land. Because of that, this concept can be
carried forward into His own day, as Jesus would have done, building on Ezra
and Nehemiah’s declarations that the exile was continuing even though the
Creator God’s people had returned to their land, and it can be verified that
the people of Israel (by and large) still saw themselves as a people in
exile. This ongoing conception of exile from God’s blessings, among other
things, was a major impetus behind the attempts at revolution in the centuries
leading up to, and the century following Jesus’ life, death, and
Resurrection.
Part of the
anticipation for their messiah, which was connected with the vision of Daniel
and the four hundred ninety years attached to that vision that would culminate
with the coming of the messiah (regardless of when Daniel was composed), was
that the messiah, their king (Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David---all kingly
terms that would eventually be vested with divine significance because of the
post-Resurrection realization, by His disciples, that Jesus had been the
physical embodiment of God in His saving action on behalf of His chosen people)
would bring Israel’s long exile to an end once and for all.
No comments:
Post a Comment