Along with many other academics — and many hymnwriters — J. R. Daniel Kirk believes the advent ended the Babylonian exile. He writes: “The exile was insufficient to pay for the people’s sins. So not only did the exile endure, so did the sins which were its cause.” Is really this the case? Israel never again worshiped the Canaanite gods. However, he still has a lot to say that is good:

Matthew begins his narrative with quite the gripping tale. If it takes well-meaning, would-be readers of the Old Testament several weeks before they get mired in seemingly jumbled laws and endless genealogies, it takes their New Testament counterparts all of ten seconds.

Jesus is the son of David, the son of Abraham–and we get 20+ generations of genealogy to prove it.

But entailed in this genealogy is a story: a story of God’s promises. God has promised a king from the line of David, and God has promised a full restoration of the people–an end to the age of exile.

There was an age of Abraham; there was an age of David; and there was an age of exile (Matthew 1:17). But now the age of the messiah is dawning.

What God had promised to Israel is coming to fruition in Christ. What exile was supposed to do, but didn’t, will now be realized.

“You will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21, CEB).

Of course, this is what the prophet had long ago declared, but which had not yet been realized:

Comfort, comfort my people!
says your God.
Speak compassionately to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her that her
compulsory service has ended,
that her penalty has been paid,
that she has received
from the LORD ’s hand
double for all her sins! (Isa 40:1-2, CEB)

The exile was insufficient to pay for the people’s sins. So not only did the exile endure, so did the sins which were its cause.

Advent is the beginning of the end, the beginning of the age of the Messiah, the beginning of the restoration from exile.

Israel’s story is coming to its culmination.

Or, if you prefer the words of hymnody:

O come, o come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here–
until the son of God appear.

The problem here is that two “Covenant cycles” have been conflated. Kirk is right that Israel is coming to an end, but not about the end of exile.

The exile had come to an end long before. The passage quoted above from Isaiah refers not to the events of the first century, but to the events of the Restoration era. It seems to me there are two reasons the scholarly consensus has it wrong: 1) the book of Esther is treated as fiction; and 2) an ignorance of the architecture of the Bible, i.e. many of the fulfilments of the predictions of the prophets were people rather than stones. Ezekiel’s temple was not a vision of the church (or some future carnal Israel), but a vision of the Restoration era’s Jew-Gentile worship construct, founded in Daniel. I’ve written a lot about that on this blog, but you can trace it all back to James Jordan’s groundbreaking commentary on Daniel.

Back to the first point, it relates to the Covenant — or “matrix” cycles. There are cycles within cycles. Israel’s complete history is a cycle. But within it, there are many others, including Israel’s “death” in Egypt (Abraham to Joshua) and Israel’s death in Babylon (Solomon to Cyrus). The history of Israel via Egypt was repeated, but with Babylon at the centre.

The nation was slain and resurrected numerous times under whatever Covenant Ethics were in force at the time, and each time, Israel was more mature, more prophetic.

Post exilic Israel was not weak and beggarly. The Jews as a people were promoted to corporate “prophetic advisor” to world emperors, serving in a higher court than the Davidic kings. It was Joseph replayed on a greater stage.

Daniel played the Covenant bridegroom, obeying in the Garden by refusing the food of kingdom until he was qualified publicly. And Esther matches him chiastically as the fragrant bridal resurrection body, marrying a new Solomon and conquering the entire world. The exile was indeed over.

The situation in the first century was due to entirely new sins by a new generation. The Jews forgot their prophetic ministry and, as under Samuel, demanded a king before time. Instead of Saul they got the Herods, and Christ was the new David. But the “slavery” they suffered under Rome had nothing to do with the sins of the Davidic kings. It was the result of their disobedience to the Restoration Covenant, the one predicted by Jeremiah and ratified in Ezra and Zechariah. They broke the new High Priestly lineage of Zadok, and became elitists instead of witnesses and prophets to the nations.

The nation had been split into two (as a sacrifice) and reunited (the houses of Judah and Israel). The only reason the writer of Hebrews quotes Jeremiah is because the same process was happening again, only this time it was the reunion of Jew and Gentile.

However, Kirk is correct in observing that it was the culmination of Israel’s history, and I would push that to a conclusion far beyond the consensus’ comfort zone:

Israel’s history follows the Creation week: Light on the waters (Call of Abraham); Firmament (Red Sea parted); Land and Sea (Canaan); Ruling Lights (the Kings); Swarms/Armies (Gentile Eagles and Sea Beasts); Mediators (Land Animals [Dan. 7), Joshua the High Priest to Jeshua the High Priest); and finally the Rest promised to the Old Covenant faithful, who were seated on thrones and now rule with Christ.

Our problem is that this pattern occurs at many levels in the Bible – like a fractal – and we have a hard time separating them from each other. The Bible Matrix is the answer.

“Yoder argues that from the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews developed a proto-”free church” model of community life. True in some respects. Jews didn’t have their own polity. But I’ve got doubts if that’s a fair characterization of Jews in and after the exile.

Why? The Bible for starters. Jews in exile are not isolated in their ghettos. They are seeking the peace of the city; Daniel, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Esther are the heroes of the time, and all fully integrated in imperial culture, whether Babylonian or Persian. They weren’t Amish.

Then there’s archeology. Jewish synagogues are everywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, and they aren’t huddled off in some corner of the city. Some of them are right on the main drag.

If that’s right, it didn’t stay that way. Jews did retreat into more isolated communities over time. Which raises the question: What happened? Christian hostility to Jews is a big part of that story. But there’s perhaps something more fundamental: AD 70.

Robert Wilken wrote long ago that “the bond between Judaism and the Graeco-Roman culture was torn asunder by the Roman-Jewish wars. The epoch of Philo was the last in which the ideals of a brotherhood between Greeks and Jews could still be seriously envisaged.” AD 70 was the end of a world, the world that Jim Jordan calls the “oikoumene,” a cooperative between Jews and Gentiles that God set up at the time of the first fall of Jerusalem.

This has implications in several directions (perhaps). With regard to Yoder: The detached, free-church model comes late, not at the time of the exile. It’s a product of the Lord’s destruction of a unified Jew-and-Greco-Roman system. The “exilic” model that is found in the OT is a model that prominently includes Jews who are thoroughly engaged with the empire — even to the point of being civil servants, advisors, and prophets to the king.

More broadly: Wilken’s point challenges any simplistic Hebraic/Hellenistic dichotomy. Up until AD 70, there was no such dichotomy.

Finally, this also points to another of the ways in which AD 70 is the beginning of the Christian era. Through the Jewish wars, Judaism was isolated from Greco-Roman civilization, and gradually the church moved into the vacuum. As Tertullian claimed, the estrangement of Jews and Greeks meant that the church was the medium by which the antique wisdom and law of Judaism was brought into the Roman world.”

1. See James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, for a full rundown on this important factor. Like so many things he has written or said in lectures, you might initially think it is odd, but then it plays out in the Bible hundreds of times and answers many niggling questions.

(Thanks to Dr Leithart for his kind permission to republish here. I actually asked him this time!)

Anyhow, my friend shared that Piper had made a comment about not ‘getting’ the prophets. As there are so many views on what the prophets are talking about, this is understandable. Based on what I’ve heard from James Jordan and my resulting studies, I would like to offer some helpful hints. They seem to play out, from what I can see.

1. The prophets must all be read as Covenant lawsuits. They are sheriffs knocking on the door because the contract has been broken. The Covenant contained both blessings and curses. The prophets were a reminder, and eventually a promise, of the curses. (See also Rags to Robes.)
2. The prophecies were written to get a reaction. This means that they cannot concern modern nations. They predicted IMMINENT judgments if the generation living at the date of writing did not repent (Matthew 23-24 and Revelation are good New Testament examples of this principle).
3. Because they concern the Covenant, and the Covenant structure goes right back to Genesis 1, many prophecies are recapitulations of the Creation week, and use its language. A New Covenant is a new heavens and a new earth, or more correctly, a New Land. If your translation says “earth” anywhere in the prophets, read it as Land (the same goes for Revelation). God sees the world through His mediator-nation, which is, like the Temple (and Noah’s Ark), the three-level world-in-a-box.
4. Prefiguring Christ, God always dealt through mediators, like the prophets. But the prophets were called because the national Mediator, Israel, was in rebellion. Israel was the Land between the Firmament and the Sea, the four-cornered Altar. And their message is often that God was going to wash the Altar clean by submerging it.
5. So the prophets not only use Creation language, but also use many images from earlier judgments, like the flood. Isaiah even uses Noah’s submissive animals to describe the submission of the Gentiles to Mordecai after the exile in the “new heavens and new earth” Restoration Covenant.
6. The prophetic books sometimes look like they are arranged haphazardly, but are carefully structured. Often they follow the Egypt to wilderness to Canaan pattern. God takes the old rebellious house of Israel, deconstructs it, judgment flows out upon the surrounding nations, then God reconstructs a bigger house which absorbs some of the surrounding nations. Sound familiar? This pattern undergirds the New Testament. This pattern also helps us interpret Ezekiel 37-39 as a prophecy of the return from exile and the events in Esther. 
7. Related to this point, the books often follow the Garden, Land, World pattern established in Genesis (Adam, Cain, sons of God). God anoints His prophet, the judgments are first given as liturgy in the garden (the courthouse – Father), carried out in the Land by the prophet (representing the brother/Son) with huge ramifications upon the Gentile world (Spirit).
8. The prophets that deal intimately with the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Covenant use and modify the furniture and layout of the Tabernacle. The best example of this would be Zechariah’s visions, which follow the pattern of the seven feasts. At the Day of Atonement, there are not two goats but two Arks of the Covenant. The true one has died and ascended to heaven (seen as a flying scroll) and the false one (a round basket) is exiled to the wilderness (Zech. 5). So the missing Ark actually “died and ascended” for the life of Jeremiah’s promised new covenant. As Covenant Lawsuits, the prophets flow directly out of the Torah.
9. When the Apostles quote the prophets concerning Christ and Israel, they are rarely prophecies that concerned the first century directly. Take a look at just about any of the famous Messianic prophecies and you will find it is surrounded by images and conditions that root it firmly in the exile/Restoration era. (And of course, neither does it concern modern Israel!)
10. The secondary, and perhaps most important audience is … us! All these events were for the benefit of the church, so we can understand the foundation of the church laid in the first century. The ‘apocalyptic’ sections of the New Testament are about the end of the Restoration Covenant and the foundation for a better Temple. Just as Israel was executed and resurrected through the exile, the pattern was replayed in the first century (hence the Apostles’ quotes). God works in history in exactly the same way as He did through Israel, but through churches across the world.

If you have any questions or comments on these ideas, I would love to hear from you.

I started Hebrew lessons this week. We’ll see how long I last! Anyhow, my teacher made a comment about Ezekiel 2:1. Apparently, the phrase translated “I will speak to you” is actually a gloss. Literally, it says, I will speak you. The Lord gives Ezekiel a scroll to eat and sends him as son of man against Jerusalem.

So, as son of man, Ezekiel is the living, walking WORD. He is the Law written on tablets of flesh.

It was always God’s plan that Israel have a human king:

“When you come to the land which the LORD your God is giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me,’ you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses; one from among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not set a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.” Deut. 17:14-15

Like Adam, this dominion would only come by obedience: by servanthood to God and faithful mediatory witness to the Gentiles. But like Adam, they seized dominion and demanded “a king like the Gentiles.” With Saul, they had a king who palled around with Agag of Amalek whom Moses commanded to wipe from the face of the earth.

“Therefore it shall be, when the LORD your God has given you rest from your enemies all around, in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget.” Deut. 25:19

I have already disputed with some who say that there was no restoration after the captivity; that the Babylonian exile in practice lasted until the time of Christ. But the Covenant was restored, the Temple rebuilt, and Israel’s priestly territory expanded to the size of an empire. With Daniel and then Mordecai at the king’s right hand, the kingdom of God was another step closer to “heaven,” as James Jordan points out.* The cruciform Tabernacle of God would cover all four points of the compass. The “times of the Gentiles” were actually a step closer to the kingdom of God.

But, as with Joseph, the days came when emperors ruled who didn’t know Mordecai. A restored Israel again forgot her mission and ended up in a bondage lasting 400 years – the time between Malachi and Matthew. This period was not an extended exile. It was not extended punishment for the disobedience of Israel’s kings. It was the consequence of rebellion against the restored Covenant of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah.

As in the time of Samuel, Israel demanded their own king—a king like the Gentiles. And they got one: Herod the Edomite. Blind “Isaac” once again tried to hand the Covenant over to Esau. Not only was Herod the wrong ‘son,’ he was Abimelech, Saul, Jeroboam and Pharaoh all rolled into one. Yet those who want to identify antichrist overlook this false Messiah. Look no further.

“Then the king shall do according to his own will: he shall exalt and magnify himself above every god, shall speak blasphemies against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the wrath has been accomplished; for what has been determined shall be done. He shall regard neither the God of his fathers nor the desire of women, nor regard any god; for he shall exalt himself above them all.” Daniel 11:36

*James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, p. 260. Available here.

Land.

I read David Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance in 1989, and it sure surprised me to learn that the word ‘earth’ in the Bible also means ‘land.’ This simple fact alters the scope of John’s Revelation entirely. It is about God’s ending of the Covenant He restored after the Babylonian captivity, and so first century Judah is the main subject. It was a repeat of events in Jeremiah’s day, so let’s backtrack a little…

While the Babylonians were building siege mounds around Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah was in prison (Jeremiah 32). The Lord directed him to purchase some land from his cousin, and he performed this rite before witnesses that included all the Jews who sat in the court of the prison. We know it was an object lesson from God to demonstrate that the nation would be restored to the Land after the captivity. The prophecies of a new covenant in the surrounding chapters, Jeremiah 31 and 33 refer, first and foremost, to this restoration.

The importance of the Land to Israelites included the promise of resurrection. Abraham purchased land in which to bury Sarah. Ruth the Moabitess wanted to be buried there (and she used a ‘Covenant’ name for the Lord). Naaman the Syrian took two mule-loads of soil back to his own country. Also, David Chilton notes that when the Old Testament kingdom of priests was oppressed by the Gentiles, it was often expressed as denying their right to burial in the Land, a pledge of resurrection (Psalm 79).1

In a vision, Ezekiel saw the exhumed bones of Judah’s idolaters that God scattered before the sun, moon and stars (Jeremiah 8), reintegrated into a mighty army after the captivity (Ezekiel 37). They would conquer the Persian empire and in the process reconquer the Promised Land (Ezekiel 38-39; Esther 8-9).

The Land was an integral part of Israel’s identity as the mediator-nation. So Jeremiah’s redemption of Land was a big deal. It was the confirmation of a corporate resurrection.

In the first century, the entire pattern was repeated. Christ as Jeremiah predicted the destruction of Jerusalem. Christ as Ezekiel (the son of man) inspected the Temple for idolatry. And Christ as the human Ark of the Covenant ascended to God. After captivity in Babylon (a syncretised Jerusalem), a mighty army, the church, would become the foundation for a new Jerusalem, a new Temple, and be resurrected to conquer the Land. But there is something out of place.

Instead of a Jeremiah redeeming land, the Jewish Christians sold their lands (Acts 4:34). What, then, were they expecting to inherit as their promise of resurrection? The answer is, a heavenly country (Hebrews 11:16), a Land washed clean by blood and water. Just as the Land disappeared under water in the days of Noah, and under a flood of Babylonian troops at the exile, so those ‘buried’ in Christ – the new Land – would rise up from a Jerusalem flooded by Roman troops (Daniel 9:26) and stand on the crystal sea before God’s throne, just as Jesus had done at His baptism. It would be just like the days of Noah.

In AD70, the mediator-nation, or at least its central government, was relocated to heaven, to the Holy Place before God’s throne. The saints of all previous ages were resurrected to meet their Lord “in the air,” as twelve gates between heaven and land. The waters of the round ’Laver’, the crystal sea, became a square crystal city. It was a new heaven and a new land – a new creation. Since this event, any saint that dies enters the presence of the Lord immediately (Revelation 14:13). Our baptisms picture this event.

Of course, there is a new physical earth to come, and also the second resurrection, but these Land events of the first century prefigure the end of world history.

As David, Christ conquered Jerusalem. Now, as Solomon, He reigns over all the world from His Temple. At the end of history, this round ‘sea’ of nations will also be completed as a ‘square’ Temple, according to the architectural pattern that is ‘coming down from heaven’ (Revelation 21). As God’s Spirit-filled craftsmen (Exodus 35: 30-31), we measure out this pattern upon the world as we commune with Christ and the ascended saints in our weekly worship.

All of which makes modern Palestinian real estate totally irrelevant to the plan of God.

1 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 282.
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Zechariah later sees a flying scroll with the dimensions of the Tabernacle (10 x 20 cubits). These are also the dimensions of the Ark plus cherubim in Solomon’s Temple. The Ark had been offered as an ascension and created a new heaven – unrolled a new scroll. The Restoration Covenant cost the Ark its “life.”

Now to Acts. The human Ark, Jesus, had ascended to heaven and left the “seven churches”, the New Covenant Lampstands with tongues of fire, to rule and conquer Babylon (Jerusalem). The church did so, and we see the firstfruits church army, the “kings from the sunrising” crossing the Great River in Revelation 16, entering a new earth like Joshua over Jordan.

When the priesthood – the Land-mediators – disobeyed God, the Abyss was dredged up to cover the Land (holy place). We see this first in the flood, and later in the invasions of Assyria, Babylon and Rome.

The Valley of Hinnom became a symbol of the ‘Abyss’ below the true mountain of God. As an evil twin of the holy place, it was an ‘Adamic’ clay pit with no glorious metal. It was also the place where Judah sacrificed their infants to false gods. It was counterfeit worship in the tabernacle of hell, and the Lord said He would fill it with their bodies. Their dark ‘table of showbread’ became a snare. [Read Jeremiah 19]

After the Babylonian captivity, Zechariah saw the church in “the deep” (often translated valley or glen). A new Land-altar was rising out of the ‘waters’ – a new mountain of God, with a new Eden-temple to mediate for the world.
TAOTA

Peter Leithart writes:

NT Wright has long argued that first-century Jews considered themselves to be in a continuing exile. The canon of the Hebrew Bible suggests as much.

If we take our arrangement (the LXX arrangement), the Hebrew Bible ends with Malachi, who certainly doesn’t see a gloriously restored Israel when he looks around him.

If we take the MT arrangement, the Hebrew Bible ends with the decree of Cyrus; it’s as if the return has never happened.

Either way, the canonical arrangement supports Wright’s contention.1

I had a long debate with my friend Matt who holds Wright’s view. I see the point. But regardless of the arrangement of the canon, what does the Bible teach?

I subscribe to Jordan’s view that the exile/restoration prophecies actually concern the exile/restoration. When Jeremiah predicted a New Covenant with Israel and Judah, it was the one ratified at the beginning of Zechariah. It came to pass, no bull. Those who apply the prophecies of restoration directly to the first century get it wrong.2

The Jews may have thought they were still in captivity. But they also thought the second Temple was less glorious than Solomon’s. Ezekiel’s Temple was a vision of an empire-wide temple made of people, synagogues spread throughout the empire. It was a picture of a restored Israel’s greater spiritual influence, in the same way that Revelation’s new Jerusalem is a picture of the church.

Like many Christians today, they were impatient for the Messiah to come and “wash behind their ears”, fix all their problems, when He had commanded them to conquer the world with their witness. The exile was long over, and atoned for as well. The Jews failed to understand the times they lived in, and so do we in many cases. Like Israel in Ezekiel 37, the first century church was an Israel resurrected for warfare.

_______

1 Peter J. Leithart, Continuing Exile and Canon.

2 Doug Wilson’s excellent new commentary on Hebrews, Christ and His Rivals, still does this from what I have read so far. To be sure, the apostles quoted the prophets because they prefigured the first century, but the details of the prophecies anchor them in previous history.