Lecture 21: The End of the Twelve, the Long Wait, and Matthew's Fulfillment

The lecture, section by section

1. He will rejoice over you with singing

   Zephaniah ends in music: the King of Israel is in your midst; never again fear evil; do not let your hands grow weak, Zion, for the LORD your God is among you, a warrior who saves, who rejoices over you with gladness, quiets you in his love, and delights in you with singing. Schreiner presses the pastoral truth many believers cannot bring themselves to accept: God is not perpetually angry with his children. He used to tell his congregation regularly that if you are following the Lord, trusting him, obeying him, and confessing your sins, God is pleased with you. The daily impression that God is simply mad at you is not the truth about his children.

2. Haggai and Zechariah: the kingdom through a king

   Haggai, short as it is, promises that the Lord will shake the heavens and the earth and bring down the kingdoms; the Lord's kingdom will be established through Zerubbabel, who stands in David's line, for the kingdom comes through a king. The latter glory of the temple will exceed the former, which Schreiner reads as fulfilled in the new creation, while granting that premillennial readers may locate it in a millennial temple, or in both. For Zechariah he borrows Barry Webb's summary: the arrival of the Messiah is the time for false shepherds to be judged, for the dispersed flock to be regathered, and for the new Israel to be created. The Lord will save his people; they will repent and turn to him, and those who will not turn will be judged. Malachi closes the collection: Yahweh's name will be great among the nations, a messenger will come to his temple to purify his people, and the Lord will keep his covenant promises at last.

3. Four ways to say the kingdom is coming

   The Book of the Twelve summed: judgment and salvation, the day of the LORD carrying both, the kingdom coming, the wicked judged and the righteous vindicated, the covenant promises kept. Looking at the prophets as a whole, Schreiner offers a summary easy to remember: a new David is coming, a new covenant is coming, a new exodus is coming, and a new creation is coming, four different ways of announcing one kingdom. He adds a preacher's aside: the Twelve make excellent short series, four sermons on Malachi or on Jonah, interspersed between longer books.

4. What the curses become

   Asked how the covenant cursings apply to Christians, Schreiner answers that we are not under that covenant: there is no direct link between our sin and our land. Canonically, the New Testament translates the covenant curse into final judgment and the covenant blessing into eternal life in the new creation. Hebrews does exactly this in its warning passages: Israel suffered earthly judgment, and you are warned from heaven of a greater, eternal one. That translation matters for preaching, because people, believers included, need regular reminding that eternal destiny is at stake and that the gospel is for the church too.

5. Sixteen hundred slow years

   Take stock at 400 BC. God covenanted at creation, promised the woman's offspring, gave Abraham land, offspring, and blessing, bound Israel in covenant, and executed the covenant's curses, chiefly physical judgments in the old covenant's terms, in exile. The people are back in the land, and they are weak, exerting no worldwide influence, at the mercy of other nations. Sixteen hundred years have passed since Abraham, and the promises seem hardly to have advanced. The lesson Schreiner draws is one he gives to seminary students in a hurry: God is not in a hurry to accomplish his plan, and he does not need you; he can use you, and the kingdom will be just fine without you, so prepare deeply for a lifelong ministry. Then four hundred more years pass, Israel under the thumb of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and a reader could be pardoned for thinking the promises would never come true. Yet when the New Testament opens, a remnant is still out there, waiting.

6. The parties of the waiting

   The waiting took different shapes. The Sadducees were the elite, moneyed aristocracy, the pragmatic power group. The Pharisees were a lay movement, volunteers who longed for the kingdom and expected it to come through obedience to Torah; there was a saying that if all Israel could keep the Torah for a single day, the kingdom would come, and Jacob Neusner's work pictures their aim as the temple's purity spread across the whole land. Their politics grew tangled with the Hasmoneans: when Pharisees pelted Alexander Jannaeus with citrons at a feast, he crucified eight hundred of them. The Essenes, usually identified with Qumran, judged the temple establishment hopelessly compromised and withdrew to bring the kingdom by radical obedience, a community of the new covenant awaiting the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness, with rules strict enough to expel a man for laughing in the assembly. And a zealot impulse was rising, visible in Judas at the census near Jesus' birth, for whom Roman registration and Roman taxes acknowledged another lord, which is why the tax question later put to Jesus carried such freight. Josephus records movement after movement promising to bring in the kingdom, walls falling like Jericho's, and all of them failed, as Gamaliel soberly recounts in Acts 5. The Psalms of Solomon, written around 50 BC in pharisaic circles, still cry out for the Messiah. The remarkable thing is that after all those years, most had not given up hope.

7. The Gospels announce fulfillment

   What do the Gospels say about the kingdom? Fulfillment. Matthew's first verse screams it: Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham; to anyone who knows the story, the whole promise stands up in those names, and Matthew, written especially for Jews, opens with a genealogy that is anything but dull. The book's ends answer each other: Immanuel at the beginning, and I am with you always at the close. And the opening words, the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ, recall the Bible's first book: he is son of Abraham, son of David, and Son of God.

8. The editor's hand and the little people

   Matthew often designates Jesus as the Christ redactionally, in his own narration: an author's deliberate choice, the evangelist's editorial hand. He is not writing neutral chronicle; he writes from a perspective, and the postmodernists are right that no one writes from nowhere. The Christian answer is that the evangelists' perspective is God's perspective: their bias is the true one. Within the story, meanwhile, watch who confesses Jesus as the Christ, the son of David: the blind, a Canaanite woman, the common people, the children. The religious leaders mock the claim; the little people see it.

9. The genealogy preaches the end of exile

   Matthew splits the genealogy into three sets of fourteen and makes the exile a hinge of the whole, and the arrangement preaches: the exile is over, its promises fulfilled in Jesus. Kings have come and gone; here is the King. He will save his people from their sins, and he is Immanuel in the fullest sense. The Bethlehem prophecy Schreiner takes as a direct, straight-line prediction fulfilled at his birth.

10. The Nazarene

    Some of Matthew's fulfillment texts are hard, and he shall be called a Nazarene is one: no Old Testament passage says it. Perhaps Matthew means that Jesus fulfills what all the Nazirites represented, total dedication to God from birth to death, though Jesus was no literal Nazirite, for he drank wine. Perhaps he is playing on the netser, the branch from Jesse's roots in Isaiah 11. Perhaps both. Some scholars say Matthew simply got it wrong; others, like Longenecker, call the method inspired but not to be imitated. Schreiner goes neither direction: Matthew is teaching us how to read the Old Testament, and we follow his pattern, carefully, without running past it.

11. Out of Egypt I called my son

    Hosea 11:1 is Matthew's boldest citation, and it is not a prediction at all. In Hosea it is history: when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son; and the more they were called, the more they sacrificed to the Baals. God taught Ephraim to walk, led them with cords of kindness, bent down to feed them; and because they refused to return, Assyria would be their king, the sword loosed in their cities. Then the astonishing turn: how can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I make you like Admah and Zeboiim, the two little towns destroyed alongside Sodom? The meaning is not that Assyria is canceled, for they went; the meaning is, I will judge you, and I will not wipe you out; the promises are not revoked. So the Lord will roar like a lion and his children will come trembling, like birds from Egypt, like doves from Assyria, and the mention of Egypt gives the game away, for they were never in Egypt: this is new exodus language. The chapter opens with the old exodus and closes with a new one; the first anticipates the second. Why then does Matthew read it of Jesus? Because Jesus is the true Israel, in whom Israel is comprised, the one seed of Galatians 3:16, and the promised new exodus is fulfilled in him. Not a prophecy broken, but a mystery revealed, a fulfillment that trades on the whole biblical storyline.

12. Elijah has come, the dove has landed

    Isaiah 40's voice preparing the way belongs, the Gospels say, to the Baptist, and Jesus himself settles the Elijah question: Elijah has come, and he is John the Baptist. Schreiner finds it fascinating that so many still expect the historical Elijah when Jesus has interpreted the passage for us, and he says with a smile that he will love those who disagree. At the baptism the Spirit descends as a dove, and the dove carries creation in its wings, the Spirit over the waters, the dove over the flood returning to Noah: a new creation is coming. And the voice: you are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Israel is God's son; David is God's son; supremely, Jesus is the Son with whom God is well pleased, which is why Schreiner calls it hermeneutically legitimate to name Jesus the true Israel, the only true Israelite, so that, as Paul argues, one becomes a child of Abraham and a child of God only by belonging to the Son. And the words carry the servant too, my chosen, in whom I delight: true Israel, true King, Spirit-anointed servant, the one who gives his life as a ransom for many.

13. No kingdom without the cross

    All these promises, Schreiner insists, are fulfilled through Jesus' death and resurrection, and he confesses a standing annoyance: the last twenty years' emphasis on the kingdom, right in itself, has too often diminished the cross. Every Gospel ends with the cross and the resurrection, and the three Gospels that most stress the kingdom, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all stress the cross. To preach the kingdom without the cross and the resurrection is to misunderstand the kingdom. He commends Jeremy Treat's The Crucified King as the book that puts kingdom, cross, and resurrection back together beautifully, and credits it with making the mistake rarer.

1. Zephaniah says God rejoices over his trusting, confessing children with singing, and many believers live as if he is perpetually displeased. Which assumption do you actually live under, and what would change if you believed the song?

2. God is not in a hurry, and he does not need us, and he delights to use us. Where has hurry crept into your serving or preparing, and what would unhurried faithfulness look like this season?

3. In Matthew the little people see what the experts mock. Where might familiarity be dulling your own sight of Christ, and what would childlike confession sound like from you this week?