As we noted in the last section, there is a taxis to the offices of Christ that express the taxis of the Trinity. Christ’s kingly office1 comes first and enables his priestly work. As the prototype of Christian freedom, Christ possesses all as king. Therefore, he is capable of giving all as priest. As heir of God’s promise of eternal kingship to David (2 Sam 7; Ps 2, 89, 110), Jesus is the true Davidic king (Matt 1:1, 9:27, 15:22, 20:30, 20:31, 21:9, 21:15; Luke 1:32, 1:69; Rom 1:3; Rev 3:7, 5:5, 22:16.). As the king of all creation, Christ is the restorer of humanity’s place within the original creation. In this, he also fulfills the Abrahamic testament and its promise of universal blessing for all humanity (Gen. 22:15-18).2
The True Son of David
As a descendent of David, Jesus is the true inheritor of the promise of the Davidic testament. Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies make Jesus’s literal descent clear. Hence, the affirmation that Jesus is actually David’s descendent is essential to the confession of the Christian faith….
Crucially, Jesus’s descent from David literally and tangibly fulfills God’s promise to David. Moreover, the kingly mediators of the old covenant were elected to prefigure and manifest the grace of the coming Christ. Jesus’s fulfillment of this role and literal descent from David demonstrates that God is faithful to his promises in real time and objective history.
God elected David and his descendants to fulfill the role of mediation in Israel’s place. Prior to David’s election, God had sought to mediate his presence to creation through Israel as a “priestly nation” (Exod. 19:6). He also removed idolatry from the land by means of conquest. As the true Davidic king and God’s true Son, Jesus fulfills the ultimate purpose of the Davidic monarchy. David sought to make God a house in the form of the Temple. But in actuality, God made David a “house” (2 Sam. 7:11) in that his descendent Jesus is the true Temple of God (Jn. 1:14, Jn. 2:21).3
The True Joshua Conquering God’s Enemies
God established and mediated his gracious presence through the sinful Davidic monarchs, who prefigured gracious rule of sinless Jesus. Israel’s removal of idolatry from the land also prefigured the kingly work of Jesus. Israel’s war with the Canaanites, and later the Philistines, was primarily a war to remove idolatry and idolatrous practice.
Non-Israelites like Rahab and Ruth were clearly able to avoid removal from the land and destruction by accepting the promise to Israel and the reality of the one God. As Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren noted, the real supreme enslaving false god behind the masks of all false gods is Satan. God’s campaign against idolatry throughout the history recounted in Scripture has always been aimed at snatching his people out of bondage to Satan.4
Therefore, Jesus conducted war with the Devil throughout his ministry by means of exorcisms, healings, and the forgiveness of sins. As Anglican theologian N.T. Wright notes, Jesus’s insight into the nationalist-messianic movements of his day was that they were essentially superficial in their thinking. They saw the Romans, as well as Jewish collaborators with their Gentile overlords, as the primary enemies of God’s people. In reality, sin, the power of the Devil, lies behind all social and political injustice.5 At its heart, the various permutations of contemporary Liberation Theology share this superficiality.
Only by defeating the root cause of evil, Satan and the power of sin, could God’s people enter into the divine rest of the eternal Sabbath. As part of the Davidic covenant, God promised rest from all enemies (2 Sam. 7:11). The promise of rest was a continuation of the fulfillment of God’s promise to secure the people in the land through Joshua, a type of Jesus (Josh. 21:44).
King Jesus is our Sabbath Rest
Nevertheless, as the Epistle to the Hebrews shows (Heb. 3-4), such “rests” were only temporal and not the final eternal Sabbath rest toward which all creation had been moving since its inception. The first Sabbath that had no morning or evening (Gen. 2:2-3) typologically prefigured this eternal Sabbath. Of course, sin intervened and blocked the movement of creation toward eternal Sabbath rest.
Through his kingly office, Jesus is the true Sabbath. He gives his people rest from sin, death, the Devil, and the need to fulfill the law: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Jesus granted rest by fulfilling the law and absorbing its condemnation. In his death and resurrection he defeated God’s enemies, thereby securing the new Israel in Father’s eternal kingdom as our true Joshua.6
- See similar argument in: Kilcrease, The Self-Donation of God, 220-225. ↩︎
- Scott Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 176-237. ↩︎
- Leithart, A House for My Name, 130-131. ↩︎
- Wingren, The Living Word, 42-44. ↩︎
- Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 2:446-551. ↩︎
- See excellent treatment of this theme in: Jeremy Treat, The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014). ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from Mark Langley, “Celebrating Christ The King Sunday In A Democratic Republic,” Lion & Ox, November 24, 2017, accessed July 12, 2024, https://lionandox.com/2017/11/24/celebrating-christ-the-king-sunday-in-a-democratic-republic/; other image from Girolamo Genga (attributed), A Jesse Tree, c. 1535, at Art UK, accessed July 14, 2024, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-jesse-tree-114005; and John Nichiporuk, “Joshua as a Prototype of Jesus Christ,” The Catalog of Good Deeds, October 7, 2020, accessed July 14, 2024, https://catalog.obitel-minsk.com/blog/2020/10/joshua-as-a-prototype-of-jesus-christ.