Post 5: Why Jesus’ Atonement Involved the Retelling of Older Stories: He Carried Human Nature, But Did It Better
What Penal Substitution Misses: The Human Impact on Human Nature
A further unfortunate result of Stott’s approach to Jesus’ cry is that he obscures Matthew’s actual atonement theology. As I argue in what follows, Matthew utilizes the narrative format of atonement called recapitulation, where Jesus ‘fills to the full’ the narratives and stories before him, stories that previously went unfulfilled because of the failure caused by sin. Within that narrative format of recapitulation lies the medical substitutionary atonement, in which the doctor (God) becomes the patient (Jesus) through his obedience to the rigorous treatment plan (active, not passive, obedience) in order to beat the disease (sinfulness) within himself through death and resurrection (atonement), share himself and his victory with his people (sending of the Spirit).
Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130 – 202 AD), student of Polycarp of Smyrna, who was the student of the apostle John, repeated the idea of recapitulation found in the Gospels and Ephesians 1:10 by saying that Jesus ‘passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God.’[1] In Irenaeus’ teaching, human life itself is considered to have an intended, developmental shape, quite naturally from creation, regardless of the fall and notwithstanding it. So Jesus ‘passed through every age’ because he needed to ‘fill’ not just human nature as an abstract thing, but human nature in a developmental paradigm. The natural course of a human life is a temple that needs to be filled by God in time, at each stage of life. So Jesus did to his own human life. Here is Irenaeus’ famous statement:
‘Being a Master, therefore, He also possessed the age of a Master [i.e. thirty years at least], not despising or evading any condition of humanity, nor setting aside in Himself that law which He had appointed for the human race, but sanctifying every age, by that period corresponding to it which belonged to Himself. For He came to save all through means of Himself – all, I say, who through Him are born again to God – infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men. He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, being at the same time made to them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission; a youth for youths, becoming an example to youths, and thus sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise He was an old man for old men, that He might be a perfect Master for all, not merely as respects the setting forth of the truth, but also as regards age, sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and becoming an example to them likewise. Then, at last, He came on to death itself, that He might be ‘the first-born from the dead, that in all things He might have the pre-eminence [Colossians 1:18],’ the Prince of life [Acts 3:15], existing before all, and going before all.’[2]
This statement undergirds Irenaeus’ famous ‘recapitulation’ theory of atonement.[3] We picture the young Jesus of Nazareth listening to Psalms sung by Mary and Joseph, praying to the Father, soaking in the Scriptures read in the synagogue, pondering every word, and piecing together his vocation. Jesus’ own human process of learning from childhood to adulthood is glimpsed by Isaiah, Luke, and Hebrews. Once again, the portrait we draw from Scripture is that even in Jesus, human nature is not just a timeless ‘thing’ that had to be united with divine nature in one instant from which the union remained statically true henceforth. Human nature itself, by definition, required development, growth, and filling. For human nature in each person was designed to be the ground for God to fill each stage of life. Human nature and human personhood are inseparable from personal narrative. Since Jesus claimed to be the true ‘temple’ of God in his humanity (Jn.2:12 – 25; 14:1 – 3), a humanity that already required a temple-filling pattern of gradual development, then I feel doubly confirmed in this temple Christology. If the creator of human nature took human nature himself, how much more would he respect his own design? This Irenaean insight about human developmental stages, combined with the assertion above that Jesus assumed a fallen human nature and fought his way through it, leads naturally to an appreciation of Jesus facing age-appropriate challenges connected to bearing fallen human nature and pressing through these biological and relational stages.
Irenaeus explains Jesus’ lifelong atoning act as a medical substitution. What human beings were supposed to do, and could not, Jesus did. We were supposed to be faithful and obedient to God, thereby putting to death the corruption of sin in us. But we all failed. Irenaeus says Jesus substituted himself in for us through his active obedience, to perform a medical rescue operation on his own human nature:
‘Therefore, as I have already said, He caused man (human nature) to cleave to and to become, one with God. For unless man had overcome the enemy of man, the enemy would not have been legitimately vanquished… But the law coming, which was given by Moses, and testifying of sin that it is a sinner… laid, however, a weighty burden upon man, who had sin in himself, showing that he was liable to death… For it behooved Him who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man; who had been drawn by sin into bondage, but was held by death, so that sin should be destroyed by man, and man should go forth from death… What He did appear [i.e. human], that He also was: God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man; and therefore His works are true.[4]
Salvation from Sin
Irenaeus’ paradigm is also Matthew’s. Matthew says that Jesus came to save his people from their sins (Mt.1:21). It is very important that Matthew provides us with his own interpretive key to Jesus’ person and work right from the start of his narrative. To say that Jesus saves us from our sins is different from the later Lutheran-Calvinist idea that Jesus saves us from the punishment due to us because of our sins.
God had already delivered to Israel the punishments due their sins (Heb.2:1 – 2). Israel had already been suffering from the exile which began with Babylon (Mt.1:17), and there was no retracting that or undoing the past. And human beings had already been suffering from a more profound exile and death since God expelled us from the garden to protect us from immortalizing the corruption of sin in our bodies by eating from the tree of life (Gen.3:20 – 24). If God was going to bring either form of exile, or both, to an end, and restore us to what He had always intended, He needed to resolve the reason for exile and death in the first place. So the deepest and most profound problem that Jesus needed to solve was the problem of the sin within us. God deals with the source of the problem, not the supposedly punitive consequences that He still reserved behind the achievement of Jesus.
Matthew and the Sinai Covenant
Positioning Jesus within the narrative of Israel and her exile requires a prefatory remark about Matthew’s likely understanding of that narrative. At a minimum, Matthew must have understood this: By providing Israel with a good law and a good land, God removed the external factors that fallen human beings since Adam were very likely to scapegoat for their own failures. The Hebrew prophets, appropriately, sought for answers as to why Israel repeatedly failed its side of the Sinai covenant. Time and again, they came to the conclusion that something had gone wrong internal to human beings, within our human nature. This is why the genealogy of Genesis 2:4 – 4:26 displays how Adam and Eve corrupted their human nature, and how Cain corrupted it even further, thereby giving the rather strong impression that our choices can shape our natures; why God diagnosed the human nature of people at the time of Noah as being profoundly corrupted (Gen.6:5 – 6); why the unclean disorder of sinfulness was passed down from parents to children (Lev.12; Ps.51:5); why saying either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God impacted people’s own human nature in some profound way, both positively (Ex.34:29 – 35; Dt.4:5 – 8; Prov.1:23; 2:10; 3:3; 6:21; 7:3; 8:22 – 36) and negatively (Ex.7:13; 8:15, 32; 9:34; 19:13 – 25; Dt.5:5; Num.13 – 14; Mt.15:18 – 20; Mk.7:21 – 23; Rom.1:21 – 32; Eph.4:17 – 19); why Moses recognized that obedience to the Sinai covenant commandments would have the effect of cutting something away from human nature that is unclean (Dt.10:16) but ultimately why God would have to do it on the other side of Israel’s failure and exile (Dt.30:6); and why all the prophets agreed (e.g. Ps.51:9 – 11; Isa.59:21; Jer.4:4; 17:1 – 10; 31:31 – 34; Ezk.11:18; 36:26 – 36; 37:1 – 14). Israel’s story of partnership with God and Sinai covenant were designed by God for the purpose of diagnosing the problem with human nature which had occurred at the fall, and documenting the cure God promised. The problem was ontological, not forensic.
Atonement in Matthew means that Jesus carried out the cleansing of his human nature in a human mode, specifically in the narrative of Israel within the Sinai covenant. Jesus recapitulated or ‘filled to the full’ certain key narratives before him. I am intentionally translating the word which is usually translated ‘fulfill’ (πληρωθῇ) as ‘fill to the full.’ Passages from the Hebrew Scriptures are applied to Jesus in such a way that he is said to ‘fulfill’ them even though they are not ‘predictive’ per se. A good example of this is Matthew 2:15 where Matthew narrates Jesus’ family’s return from Egypt to the land of Israel and says that the phrase ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son’ from Hosea 11:1 was ‘fulfilled’ by Jesus, even though Hosea was not making a prediction! He was simply narrating God bringing Israel out of Egypt. But since Jesus was recapitulating Israel’s story, or ‘filling it to the full,’ he replays in his own life key moments in Israel’s history like the exit from Egypt.
Like Israel, Jesus was truly descended from Abraham (Mt.1:1). Jesus was persecuted by a maniacal ruler in a manner similar to how Pharaoh of old slew the Israelite boys of Moses’ generation (Mt.2; Ex.1). He came out of Egypt like Israel did (Mt.2; Ex.2 – 12). The parallel continued further. Jesus went through the waters of his baptism like Israel went through the Red Sea (Mt.3:13 – 17; Ex.13 – 15). He went through forty days in the wilderness like Israel went through forty years (Mt.4:1 – 11; Num.13 – 14), showing by his three quotations of Deuteronomy that he was reflecting on that very period of Israel’s history. He gathered others around himself just as Israel gathered a mixed multitude from Egypt (Mt.4:12 – 25; Ex.12:49). He came to a mountain like Israel came to a mountain, but chose to go to the top of the mountain where Israel did not (Mt.5:1ff.; cf. Ex.19:13; Dt.5:5), both to give and receive the law into his human nature. Matthew even makes a large, doubled literary allusion to the Ten Commandments not only in the ‘you have heard…but I say’ formula of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5:1 – 7:29) but in what follows afterwards: Jesus did ten miracles of healing by his word (Mt.8:1 – 9:35), showing that God’s commands were always for our healing.
Matthew and the Pentateuch
Since the Pentateuch is the charter document of Israel, Matthew appears to have structured his narrative like the Pentateuch, around five blocks of the teachings of Jesus. Each literary unit ends with a particular narrative formula denoting closure of a speech:
When Jesus had finished these words (Mt.1:1 – 7:29)
When Jesus had finished giving instructions (Mt.8:1 – 11:1)
When Jesus had finished these parables (Mt.11:2 – 13:53)
When Jesus had finished these words (Mt.14:1 – 19:1)
When Jesus had finished all these words (Mt.19:3 – 26:1)
The literary allusion to Israel’s Pentateuch is reasonably straightforward. It is not that each of Matthew’s five sections of Jesus’ teaching matches one of the five books of Moses; the literary parallel does not quite work that way. But there is a sense that Jesus’ person, work, and word constitute a new covenantal foundation for a renewed Israel. For Matthew to organize it this way simply draws attention to Jesus’ claim to be Israel reconstituted, for Israel’s own – and the world’s own – sake.
In fact, Matthew brings his Gospel to a close with a scene very much like the ending of the Pentateuch. Jesus was on a high mountaintop in Mt.28:18 – 20, like Moses was on a high mountaintop in Dt.34. Jesus was overlooking a vast inheritance, just like Moses was overlooking the inheritance back then. But this time, Jesus was not dying alone on the mountain; his death and resurrection had already occurred; and now Jesus was leading his people out to conquer, not land, but people’s hearts, as his inheritance. So he says to his disciples, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations…teaching them to observe all that I commanded you’: A fitting conclusion for a teaching manual well-designed to produce and reproduce Christian disciples. Jesus’ mission thematically builds upon Israel’s spreading throughout the garden land, which itself builds upon Adam and Eve’s spreading the garden throughout the land. No surprise: He is God’s new humanity, or rather renewed humanity, for all humanity, bringing human beings back into the original creation order.
The key question underlying Matthew’s conception of atonement is how Jesus was acting upon his own human nature as he bore it from conception to resurrection. Because ‘circumcision of heart’ had become the inner meaning behind Israel being restored from exile (Dt.30:6), and because Jesus himself substituted himself in for Israel and was restored from exile in his resurrection on behalf of Israel, then it follows quite logically and of necessity that he is the one who became ‘circumcised of heart.’ In other words, the Sinai covenant with its commandments did not serve an adversarial role God took against Israel. Rather, it served a medical, even surgical, role as God was prescribing the demanding spiritual health regimen that Israel needed to be cured of sinfulness. Thus Jesus was not a penal substitute in his passive obedience at the cross, but a medical substitute in his active obedience throughout his life culminating at his cross and resurrection. We can look at Jesus from the vantage point of his humanity, specifically his Jewish humanity. If Jesus entered into the place of Israel, then he recapitulated not only Israel’s early journey, he completed Israel’s appointed task which Israel could not do: he circumcised his heart by pressing the law deeply into his own humanity and cutting away from it that which should never have lodged there (Dt.10:16). As man, he cut off the unclean aspect of his human nature; he put it to death. He fulfilled Israel’s side of the covenant to God. And if Jesus, in himself, circumcised something away from himself at his death (Rom.6:6), then Jesus must have taken on fallen humanity, not an already perfected or pre-fall humanity. The fulfillment of God’s long covenant with Israel logically requires Jesus’ full identification with Israel’s fallen condition.
But we can also look at Jesus from the vantage point of God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel. Jesus did not only recapitulate Israel’s side of the covenant, he recapitulated God’s side as well. As God pronounced blessings from creation (Gen.1:26 – 28) and both blessings and curses to Abraham (Gen.12:1 – 3) and to Israel (Dt.27 – 29), Jesus pronounced both blessings (Mt.5:1 – 12) and curses (Mt.23:1 – 39). Jesus performed ten miracles by his word (Mt.8:1 – 9:35), like God uttered ten words in the creation story of Genesis 1, ten words on Egypt, and ten commandments with Israel. Other parallels to the Pentateuch abound attesting to Matthew’s understanding that Jesus is fully divine, fully God. All this reminds any sensitive reader of Israel’s story in the Pentateuch. God alone could ‘fill to the full’ the demand and promise of the law in the Sinai covenant. Or, put another way to make the same point, He alone could fill to the full the vocation of Israel. If Jesus entered into the place of Israel, the divine one who carried Israel’s humanity upon his shoulders, then and only then did God actually do what He said He would: circumcise the heart of Israel (Dt.30:6, cf. 29:4). That is, the Word of God inscribed His law on a human heart. That simultaneously means that God was faithful to the covenant to produce a humanity that is restored from exile and resurrected into the intended life of the garden paradise (Dt.30:1 – 6).
Given constraints of time and space in this essay, I will treat only briefly the major sections in Matthew to see how each supports the medical substitutionary atonement paradigm which undergirds the whole life of Christ.
Section One of Matthew
In Matthew’s first section, 1:1 – 7:28, we are introduced to the deeper dynamics of Jesus’ internal life, and how he undid the failures of Israel’s internal life. I have already discussed the theological significance of Matthew introducing us to Israel in exile (Mt.1:1 – 17), how it demanded an explanation centered around the fallen status of Israel’s human nature, and its healing. Mention must also be made, along that line of reasoning, about Mary of Nazareth. Matthew presents Mary as virginal, but otherwise just like any other Israelite, which means, fully participating in fallen Adamic humanity. Matthew knows nothing of Mary’s supposedly immaculate conception and purified humanity, a later Roman Catholic intrusion that confuses the matter.
Jesus as an adult knew he needed to be baptized. Baptism itself represented God cleansing and renewing humanity, based as it was in the story of God bringing life out of the waters (Gen.1:3), the flood waters (Gen.9), and the Red Sea’s waters (Ex.14), and promising cleansing Edenic waters again (Ezk.36:25; 47 – 48). Passing through water indicated one’s own creation and exodus experience. For Jesus to request baptism, then, was surprising, as John the Baptist attested. Did the messiah need to be cleansed, or to represent himself as needing cleansing? Apparently so, because he was carrying the same human nature we had. If he came in the likeness of men (Phil.2:7), then he came in the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom.8:3). Jesus therefore submitted to the rite, in effect exposing human nature as requiring cleansing via death and resurrection, and confessing its sinfulness for us and our salvation.
Jesus also knew he needed the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the blessing of the Father to begin his public messianic ministry. John the Baptist had depicted baptism of the Spirit as involving divine fire (Mt.3:11). The Spirit, then, is depicted as light, and Jesus subsequently declared himself to be God’s long-looked-for light (Mt.4:16), extending the honor of being light-bearers to his disciples by extension (Mt.5:14 – 16; 6:22; 25:1 – 13). At a pivotal moment in the narrative, Jesus repeated the baptismal motif and the blessing of the Father. He revealed himself in transfigured light, in a fuller disclosure of himself by the Spirit (Mt.17:1 – 13). He did this on a mountain, evoking the experience of Moses on a mountain with God in more than just a physical repeat of the phenomenon. Jesus transfigured his humanity with the divine fire of the Spirit to show his end-goal: to perfect the union of human nature and God’s Spirit in his own body, through his faithful obedience unto the Father, so that he could share the Spirit of his new humanity with us.
Rather than give into temptation in the wilderness, or at any point in his life, Jesus succeeded in resisting every temptation. Rather than resist God at Mount Sinai, Jesus continued to receive the law fully into his own humanity as he gave the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5 – 7). What Jeremiah longed to see – God writing His law on the human heart (Jer.31:31 – 34), to rewrite the sin inscribed there (Jer.17:1 – 10) and circumcise the uncleanness away (Jer.4:4) – Jesus first did in himself. Jesus commandments for the human heart must be understood as part of the prophetic hope for God to change the human heart. Thus, Jesus declared that blessed are the pure in heart (Mt.5:8); do not harbor anger in one’s heart (Mt.5:21 – 26); do not lust for that is adultery in the heart (Mt.5:28); your Father sees your secret, heart motives (Mt.6:4, 6, 18); what you treasure determines your heart (Mt.6:21); the false prophets are inwardly ravenous wolves who have not allowed Jesus to transform their hearts (Mt.7:15). As he lived and taught, and went to his death and resurrection, Jesus was perfecting this human heart for us. He will return to this topic.
In these ways and more, Jesus filled to the full the story of Israel. He used Israel’s story as a template, into which he poured the content of his own life and teaching. But because he surpassed Israel’s previous life, he burst the boundaries of the previous narrative – especially as regards the Sinai covenant – so he could fill it to overflowing. At every point in his own life, Jesus succeeded where Israel failed, because Jesus succeeded on behalf of Israel, for Israel could only ultimately fail because they shared in the corruption that had set in to all Adamic humanity since the fall. Finally, Jesus, like Israel, went through the exilic experience – suffering pain, humiliation, and death at the hands of the Gentiles. And first among all Israel, and actually as Israel, Jesus emerged in his resurrection on the other side of exile.
Section Two of Matthew
In the second section (Mt.8:1 – 11:1), Matthew organizes ten miracles of Jesus into two chapters. Just as God spoke ten words to bring Israel out of Egypt, so in Matthew 8:1 – 9:38, Jesus does ten miracles by his word to bring humanity out of sickness, demonic oppression, and death. Jesus quotes one of the greatest atonement texts in the Old Testament – Isaiah 53:4 – in the context of healing disease, not receiving punishment.
Matthew seems to group these miracles together in a way that is not strictly chronological. Mark and Luke record these miracles as well, but spread them out in different places in Jesus’ ministry, and sometimes in a different order from Matthew. I believe Matthew does this to highlight a parallel between Jesus’ ten miracles and other sequences of ten utterances from God. Matthew is clearly aware that there is already a pre-existing pattern around the number ten concerning God’s activities in the history of Israel. Here is that pattern:
Ten Acts Leading Up to a New Work of God
Genesis 1:1 – 2:3: Ten declarations in creation; God forms all life
Genesis 5:1 – 6:1: Ten generations from Adam to Noah; God brings about a new creation (Noah and his wife are a new version of Adam and Eve; creation cleansed through water and Spirit)
Genesis 11:10 – 30: Ten generations from Shem to Abram; God brings about a new humanity (Abraham and Sarah are a new version of Adam and Eve)
Genesis 2:4 – 50:26: Ten genealogies from creation to Israel; God forms the nation Israel
Exodus 7 – 11: Ten plagues on Egypt; God frees Israel from bondage
Exodus 19 – 20: Ten commandments; God shapes Israel through the Sinai encounter
Matthew 8 – 9: Ten word miracles; Jesus frees people from death, disease, demons
In effect, Matthew’s parallel extends even before the Exodus and the Ten Commandments. That is because those incidents from Exodus were already referring to Genesis. God was making Israel into his new humanity, who lived in a garden land like the original humanity. Ten utterances from God bring forth new life; they inaugurate a covenant; they set free and liberate; they order and declare. They demonstrate God’s power to do all these things. Thus, when we listen to Jesus’ teaching on our hearts, may we receive his word with the understanding that his word contains his power to change us. Jesus brings forth new life in us; he sets free and liberates us from our sin; his word orders and declares a new spiritual reality.
Here is the structure of this section:
Miracle 1 (8:1 – 4): ‘Jesus…touched him, saying…’
Miracle 2 (8:5 – 13): ‘Just say the word’
Miracle 3 (8:14 – 17): ‘He cast out the spirits with a word’
Teaching 1 (8:18 – 22): Jesus requires everything
Miracle 4 (8:23 – 27): ‘He… rebuked the winds and the sea’
Miracle 5 (8:28 – 34): ‘He said to them, ‘Go!’’
Miracle 6 (9:1 – 8): ‘He said to the paralytic…’
Teaching 2 (9:9 – 17): Jesus has come to heal sinners
Miracle 7 (9:20 – 22): ‘Jesus turning and seeing her said…’
Miracle 8 (9:18 – 19, 23 – 26): ‘He said, ‘Leave, for the girl has not died’’
Miracle 9 (9:27 – 31): ‘He touched their eyes, saying…’
Miracle 10 (9:32 – 34): ‘the demon was cast out, the mute man spoke’
Teaching 3 (9:35 – 38): More workers for the harvest!
Matthew begins this section with the phrase ‘stretched out his hand.’ That is a classical Jewish way of describing the power of God. It referred to God delivering Israel out of Egypt (Ex.3:20; 7:5; Ps.136:12; 138:7). Here we see the full character of God’s outstretched hand. It is Jesus’ hand, reaching out to deliver a man from leprosy. The phrase is a trigger, helping a Jewish reader think of God’s mighty Exodus deliverance through the ten plagues.
This phrase, ‘Jesus stretched out his hand’ (Mt.8:3), is a significant literary marker calling for our attention. Jesus demonstrated power unlike anything Israel had ever seen, power that surpassed what was demonstrated in the Exodus. He liberated people – both Jew and Gentile – from disease, demons, and death. Jesus worked within the long-held Jewish views that originate in the Pentateuch about how human biological disorders portray human sinfulness, as in general fallenness, not personalized guilt. Jesus was restoring humanity to what God meant us to be. These acts were outward pictures of Jesus liberating people from the even deeper problem of human sin, evil, and resistance to God. The three lessons on discipleship woven into the ten miracles suggest that Jesus’ call for disciples to follow him should be understood as his way of healing us.
Also, Matthew condenses his narration of these miracle stories to highlight Jesus’ word. For example, in the demoniac story in Mark, Jesus engages in a longer process of exorcism through repeated questions and commands (Mk.5:8 – 9). But in Matthew, Jesus says one word, ‘Begone!’ and expels the demons into the pigs. Similarly, in both Mark and Luke, the hemorrhaging woman touches Jesus’ cloak and then tries to hide in the crowd (Mk.5; Lk.8). But in Matthew, there is no touch; Jesus simply turns around, speaks, and heals her (Mt.9:22).
Hebrew biblical narrative and common sense allow a narrator to leave out information, but not to make up anything. Matthew took the stories about Jesus, which circulated orally and were recorded in extended forms by Mark and Luke, and compresses them to make his emphasis clear: Jesus heals by his word. Matthew also provides a fairly robust account of Jesus’ teaching, by contrast. And these two literary decisions relate to each other.
Jesus’ word heals us by destroying disease. The word-miracles suggest that the works which Jesus did in others’ bodies represented what he was doing within his own human nature. In medical substitution atonement, Jesus’ miracles serve as illustrations of the atonement itself. The shift from the penal substitution paradigm where God’s love and God’s wrath are directed at the same object, to the medical substitution paradigm where God’s love is directed at our personhood and our nature while God’s wrath is directed at the corruption within our nature, makes all the difference. God is like a surgeon wielding a circumcision knife, whose wrath is directed at the cancer in us, while His love is directed at us. God is like a metalworker whose wrath is directed at the dross mixed in with the gold of who we are, while His love is directed at the gold. When Jesus healed the bodies of others, he showed his wrath not against the people, but against the diseases, disorders, demons, and death; and he showed his love for the people themselves.
Moreover, the ten miracles continue to look back to both Mt.1:21 and Mt.5:1 – 7:29 to interpret salvation from sin and heart transformation, respectively, as God’s healing, cleansing, and restorative work. Through his spoken word, and especially in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains and exposits what he was doing to his own human nature. His heart level transformation, Jesus says, is how he saves his people from their sins (Mt.1:21). God is like an addiction counselor whose wrath is directed verbally at the addictions in us, while His love is directed at us. Jesus’ teaching purifies us.
Even more significant is Matthew’s use of Isaiah 53:4 in one specific place where he quotes it in the midst of these ten word-miracles (Mt.8:17). I have explored this citation in some length elsewhere.[5] Matthew, by quoting Isaiah 53:4, ‘He himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases,’ links atonement, which separates human beings from sinfulness, and physical healing, which separates human beings from disorders. Matthew strongly suggests that Isaiah, and behind Isaiah, Leviticus, are meant to be taken in a medical and surgical paradigm. That is, God’s presence in the sacrificial system of Israel culminating in the day of atonement (Lev.16) should be understood as acting like a modern-day dialysis machine, receiving our impurities and giving back purified life-blood. By extension and by association, Isaiah’s portrait of the Suffering Servant in the idiom of that sacrifice (Isa.53:4 – 10) should also be understood in terms of the Servant sharing our disease in order to defeat it, that we might share in his healing. As Isaiah connected the suffering of the Suffering Servant to sharing in, not deflecting, Israel’s exilic suffering, so Matthew seems to also want us to understand Jesus of Nazareth as suffering from his sharing in Israel’s exilic suffering. That had concrete physical, material, emotional, and relational consequences for Jesus, from his infancy through his adulthood. Because Israel’s exile was a microcosm of Adam and Eve’s exile, and a further examination of corrupted human nature universal to all, but under conditions of the Sinai covenant, there is a relation between exilic Israel and fallen humanity writ large. Jesus shared in Israel’s and Adam’s fallen humanity, that we might share in his healed humanity. The story of Jesus can therefore be organized, as Matthew has done, around Jesus sharing in our exile, that we might share in his restoration from exile.
Section Three of Matthew
In the third section (Mt.11:2 – 13:58), Matthew focuses on how Jesus also ‘filled to the full’ the story of David. Like David, he grew up in relative obscurity. Like David was anointed to be king by the prophet Samuel, Jesus was anointed to be king by the prophet John the Baptist (Mt.3:13 – 17). Like David fought Goliath, Jesus fought a giant in the wilderness (Mt.4:1 – 11). The overlap in stories between David and Israel is remarkable, and already present in the narrative of Samuel. Both Israel and David were portrayed and understood by the biblical narrators as a partial restoration of Adam. David was portrayed as a young man as among the beasts (1 Sam.17:34 – 37), like Adam was among the beasts. And David was promised a reign over the whole creation (2 Sam.7:16; Ps.2:8 – 12), as Adam once had dominion over the whole creation. Thus, Jesus could reference both at once.
Jesus also shared specifically in David’s pre-enthronement exile and his suffering. Like David was hunted and persecuted by the powers that be, so Jesus was (Mt.12:1 – 4; cf. 1 Sam.21:1 – 9). Like David gathered a following while being pursued, so Jesus did, too.
Section Four of Matthew
In the fourth section (Mt.14:1 – 19:2), Matthew develops Jesus paralleling his story with David’s. Like David took five loaves of bread to feed his people (1 Sam.21), so Jesus took five loaves of bread to feed his people (Mt.14:13 – 23). But Jesus was the heir of David who was greater than David. He used the five loaves to feed far more people than David ever did. He used seven other loaves, symbolic of the seven loaves that David left behind in the tabernacle, and fed Gentiles and not just Jews (Mt.15:29 – 39), which is several orders of magnitude beyond David.
Just as David built the temple in Jerusalem, so Jesus built the new temple of his body, joined by the Spirit to his followers. Just as David lamented apparently being driven out of his home and into the dangers of the Gentile warlords in Psalm 22, so also Jesus lamented being hunted and mocked and wished for dead when he quoted Psalm 22 from the cross to prove to those around him that the messiah greater-than-David would suffer more than David on his way from exile to enthronement. Jesus used David’s story as a template, into which he poured the content of his own claims to the throne of king David. As the greater David, Jesus’ exposure to the police brutality of the reigning Gentile powers was greater. But because he surpassed David’s previous life, he burst the boundaries of the previous narrative – especially in undoing David’s failures and shortcomings – so he could secure the truly expansive nature of the Davidic covenant through which God promised to bring forth a Davidic king for the whole world.
Not coincidentally, placed in between the two bread miracles, which were themselves acted references to the temple, is Jesus’ direct commentary about the temple. Jesus preserved the association between king and temple from Jewish history and the Hebrew Scriptures, but took it in a new direction. Jesus expressed dissatisfaction with the way the Jewish leaders have elevated the temple beyond what was appropriate, and distorted its meaning (Mt.15:1 – 20). Connected to this rebuke, Jesus warned about the human heart (Mt.15:18 – 20). Not only is it the source of sin, evil, and uncleanness, the heart can further pollute the person from within. The temple and the human heart serve as mirror images of each other. For the ultimate purpose of the human heart, from creation, is to be the place where God dwells by His Spirit. The prophets saw this and hoped for the day (e.g. Isa.59:21; Ezk.11:18; 36:26 – 36; Joel 2:28 – 29; etc.). But the heart needed to be cleansed, in some manner that God’s presence in the temple served as a foreshadowing, to portray.
This development confirms retrospectively that God always wanted a temple-people, not a people with a temple. Remarkably, this can be seen in the Pentateuch itself,[6] as well as in Isaiah’s prophecy which Jesus quoted. ‘This people honors Me with their lips…’ (Isa.29:13) is part of the same discourse as, ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed’ (Isa.28:16). This discourse in Isaiah must be integrated with Isaiah’s messianic prophecy, ‘Then He shall become a sanctuary; but to both the houses of Israel, a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over, and a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem’ (Isa.8:14) and its context as well. Jesus was not quoting piecemeal verses. He was evoking all of Isaiah’s prophecy and putting forward a case for interpreting all of it. And, according to the Pentateuch, the sanctuary was God’s way of providing uncorrupted life-blood which purified and cleansed the sanctuary itself, the land on which it sat, its furniture, and the people of the covenant. Since Jesus was making his case to be ‘something greater than the temple’ (Mt.12:6), he was also filling to the full its role and function.
How will Jesus cleanse the human heart? What will he do with the temple? The narrative answers those questions and more as it progresses. After giving these clues relating to bread, David, and the temple, Jesus shows that he himself will be God’s new temple. He transfigures his humanity on a mountain, enveloped in a cloud of glory (Mt.17:1 – 13). He retells the story of God’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, but takes it further. Whereas Moses’ face shone because of his encounter with God on the mountain, Jesus’ entire human body shone with a brighter light, showing that God had always wanted to place His life within people, from the garden of Eden. The bright cloud of God’s glory was a reminder of the powerful manifestation of God from the exodus event, and perhaps a glimpse of how God walked in the garden originally with Adam and Eve. The Father repeated his blessing-declaration from the baptism, ‘This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased’ (Mt.17:5; cf.3:17), which also repeats a very phrase from Isaiah, quoted when Jesus declared himself to be greater than the temple: ‘My beloved in whom My soul is well-pleased’ (Mt.12:18). This shows the Father’s pleasure and delight in Jesus, in particular upon his active obedience and faithfulness to offer his human nature constantly back to the Father, to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to be cleansed and re-stamped with the life of God.
Section Five of Matthew
In the fifth section (Mt.19:3 – 26:1), the opening stories deal with Jesus’ renewal of God’s good creation, before sin entered the story. The Pharisees put the question of divorce to Jesus. Jesus answered by referring to God’s original design for marriage, from creation, before ‘hardness of heart’: ‘He who created them from the beginning… Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning’ (Mt.19:4, 8). If Jesus was re-issuing marriage in the creational mode in which it was designed, then he must be taking away or healing ‘hardness of heart.’
A brief encounter with children allows Jesus to comment on the need for a new birth to enter the kingdom as children (Mt.19:13 – 15). Then, the rich young ruler’s approach gives Jesus occasion to speak of financial and economic sharing (Mt.19:16 – 30). He declares a radical ethic of generosity and sharing, to which the disciples reflect on the fact that they have, in fact, left everything to follow Jesus. Jesus replies that ‘in the regeneration’ (Mt.19:28), that is, in the new creation, the re-genesis of all things, which begins with Jesus, they will sit on thrones judging Israel – which I take to mean that they will be the benchmark against which other believers will be held up.
My brief treatment of these two stories which open the fifth section indicate that Jesus was framing his ministry as taking away ‘hardness of heart’ which set in after the fall. Jesus was, in effect, declaring by his ethics that he was re-issuing God’s commands from the creation, before the fall. In order to be doing this, he must have understood the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5:1 – 7:29), as he addressed the human heart quite extensively there, to convey the re-genesis, renewal, and healing of the human heart, and the power we would need to live out his commands. He must also have understood his own humanity, through his death and resurrection, to be the ontological foundation for why we would be able to follow him thus.
Paralleling his ten miracles of healing by his word, Jesus now fields ten challenging questions from his opponents. He defeats them, either through exposition of Scripture, or political logic and savvy. The last of the ten questions is Jesus’. He turns the tables on his opponents.
Ten Questions between Jesus and His Opponents in Matthew 19:3 – 22:46
‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?’ (19:3)
‘Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce…?’ (19:7)
‘Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?’ (19:16)
‘Who is this?’ (21:10)
‘Do You hear what these children are saying?’ (21:16)
‘By what authority… and who gave You this authority?’ (21:23)
‘Is it lawful to give a poll-tax to Caesar, or not?’ (22:17)
‘In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be?’ (22:27)
‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ (22:36)
Jesus asked them a question: ‘The Christ, whose son is he?’ (22:42)
The conclusion to all this questioning is that, ‘No one was able to answer him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask him another question.’ (Mt.22:46)
Overlapping with these ten questions are ten subject areas. Jesus discusses these subjects to sharply distinguish himself and his followers from the Jewish leadership of the time:
Ten Disagreements between Jesus and the Jewish Leadership in Matthew 19:3 – 22:46
Concerning creation, marriage, divorce, and singleness (19:4 – 8)
Concerning creation, generosity, and the ten commandments (19:18 – 19)
Concerning the messiah’s return to Jerusalem (21:1 – 4)
Concerning the temple (21:13)
Concerning praise for the Son of David (21:15 – 16)
Concerning Israel as God’s vineyard (21:33)
Concerning the chief cornerstone of the New Temple (21:42 – 44)
Concerning the resurrection (22:30 – 32)
Concerning the Law and the Prophets (22:35 – 39)
Concerning the Davidic king (22:41 – 46)
These ten disagreements serve to highlight Jesus’ claim to ‘fill to the full’ the story and role of Israel itself. Not only was Jesus returning the human heart to its non-hardened state, which was what Israel could not do. And not only was Jesus identifying himself as the supreme interpreter of Israel’s Scriptures through these ten declarations. He was also marking out the implications for Israel’s leadership and institutions. Thus, since Jesus fulfilled the role of the temple in himself, the Jerusalem temple had served its purpose and was obsolete (Mt.23 – 24). And henceforth, internalizing Jesus’ word would serve to constitute God’s people and Christian mission (Mt.25).
Section Six of Matthew
The climactic section of Matthew (Mt.26:2 – 28:20) uses rich Old Testament symbolism to convey what Jesus did in atonement. The theme of recapitulation – of ‘filling full’ – continues.
The act of eating bread and wine itself recapitulates the exodus-passover motif of celebrating deliverance. In the exodus-passover, the Israelites marked their doorways with the blood of the lamb, and went out through it. Thus, the imagery involved returning to the promised garden land in and through the life of another. Standing behind the exodus, and also standing before it in a partial way, is creation. God was recalling Israel back into the creational motif of eating with God in the garden once again.
In and through the life of Jesus, the restored human, God returns His people to the garden land. Hence, Jesus wanted us to remember the journey of his physical body and blood throughout his birth, life, death, and resurrection. He did not position his body and blood simply in relation to his death alone. Why? Because God’s healing for humanity is physically located in his body. Scripture indicates that all of us have a poison in our bodies, a disorder of self-centeredness where we desire and seize God’s prerogative to define good and evil. We need healing from it. The reason why God became a human being named Jesus was to acquire our disease, and have a human body in which to humanly obey the Father and thus develop the antidote to the disease. In the physical body of Jesus, God resisted every shred of self-centeredness living in that body, pushing it all the way to its death. And by rising from the dead, Jesus received a purified, renewed, and glorified humanity perfectly fused with the divine. He cleansed his humanity to fulfill the Sinai covenant, circumcising his heart (Dt.10:16; Jer.4:4) and producing in himself the circumcised heart God could share by his Spirit with all his followers (Dt.30:6), thus bringing about our ‘restoration from exile.’ God made Jesus into an ‘organ donor’ spiritually. By connecting us to the resurrected Jesus spiritually, God can now place in us Jesus’ cleansed spirit, new spiritual heart, and love for the Father. To sum up: In the physical body of Jesus, God worked out the healing to our disease so that we could all share in that healing by His Spirit.
When we eat the broken bread, we think of the brokenness that Jesus endured at his climactic death, as well as the struggles that led up to it. When we drink the wine made from crushed grapes, we think about Jesus pouring out his life, bearing the burden of our condition, at his death, certainly, but also throughout all of his life until then. When we put bread and wine into our mouths and swallow them so they can nourish us and become part of us, we remember that Jesus invested his own personhood into the physical creation via his human body. We also remember that we need Jesus’ life – what he did throughout his life, death, and resurrection – to nourish and sustain us by his Spirit. This bread and wine – and for that matter, all the food that we eat – is our holy reminder to internalize the new heart and new life from our spiritual organ donor, Jesus. By him in us, we are made new.
Especially at the end of his life, Jesus endured elements of exile from the Hebrew Scriptures. By enduring all this, he recapitulated ‘exile,’ and came out the other side. Here are those elements, which we are to remember.
First, Jesus was stripped and mockingly handed a scarlet robe. Being stripped was shameful for Jews, ever since the day Adam and Eve sinned, realized they were naked, and felt ashamed. Since that time, the people of God considered proper attire to be fairly important. But the Romans stripped Jesus. In place of his own clothes, the Roman soldiers gave him a scarlet colored robe (an inner tunic, not the same as the outer purple cloak described by Mark and John). Scarlet was a color associated with sin according to Isaiah (Isa.1:18). Ironically, Jesus, who had struggled successfully all his life to live fully in the love of his Father, had the color of sin placed on him. But it was also appropriate in a deeper way: Jesus had taken onto himself the sinful fallen humanity common to us all, and this scarlet robe symbolized that.
Second, Jesus wore a crown of thorns. Thorns were also an emblem of humanity’s fall into sin (Gen.3:17 – 19). Thorns were the painful result of Adam and Eve’s rejection of God, as God withdrew His life-giving presence somewhat from creation. Ever since then, humanity’s attempts to bring life and beauty from the creation were marred with thorns: the emblem of pain and ugliness. But thorns were also a reminder of the acacia thornbush of the desert, which God once inhabited personally (Ex.3:1 – 5; Acts 7:30), a sign that God could dwell among – and even within – his fallen creation, without annihilating it. By appearing as fire, God indicated His ability to purify fallen creation, because fire once guarded the way back to the garden (Gen.3:24). When Jesus wore a crown of thorns, it was not only physically painful. He was taking onto himself another symbol of human exile and fallenness, but also a symbol of God’s commitment to dwell among it and within it, to purify it.
Third, Jesus was mocked by his enemies. For the Jews in the biblical period up until this point, to be handed over to the Gentiles in defeat was humiliation and shame. The long Jewish history of making sinful alliances with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon resulted in God giving them over to these powers and allowing these powers to invade Israel and shame the Jews. Jesus was handed over to the Gentile enemies to share in Israel’s exile and humanity’s vulnerability.
Fourth, Jesus was hung on a tree. While the Roman practice of crucifixion was excruciating and humiliating on its own merits, the Jews also had an understanding of that act. In the Mosaic Law, being hung on a tree was the expression that the person in question had already cursed his own human nature. Some Israelites damaged their human nature so badly that they were stoned, declared ‘cursed,’ and placed on a tree (Dt.21:22 – 23). This alludes to the grotesque sin of Cain, who was a ‘stubborn and rebellious son,’ and sons are explicitly mentioned in Dt.21:18 – 21, which provides context for v.22 – 23. Notice that Cain was cursed without being hung on a tree – a very important point. Adam and Eve had already cursed human nature by seizing God’s prerogative to define good and evil, and taking it into themselves. God responded by preventing them from eating from the tree of life – that is, from immortalizing the disorder and evil within themselves (Gen.3:22 – 24), via our bodies dying and dissolving back into the earth. Cain demonstrated that human nature was corrupted because the influence of jealousy was already within him; he needed no external voice of jealousy like his parents had. And because of Cain’s own choices, he further cursed his own human nature and alienated himself from the land (Gen.4:11). Thus, in Israel’s law, the one whose body was hung on a tree reminded the community of Cain’s self-alienation from the land. Placing their body on a tree did not curse them. They cursed themselves already by their own prior choices. Thus, when Paul read Dt.21:22 – 23 in connection with Jesus hung on the cross (Gal.3:13), he recognized Jesus as identifying what was already cursed about our existence: our human nature. The cross did not impose an additional curse on Jesus. Rather, Jesus took onto himself what was already cursed. And, as in his baptism where he identified human nature as needing cleansing, Jesus on the tree identified human nature as cursed. The two events are symmetrical. Jesus hung in the place where ‘great sinners’ were to be hung. In that sense, he took our place: He shared it. He did not deflect some ‘divine retributive justice’ away from us. Instead, he killed the thing that was killing us: the corruption of sin within our humanity.
Fifth, Jesus filled to the full the role of David in exile, even more intensely than David himself endured. The Roman soldiers mocked Jesus as ‘King of the Jews’ (Mt.27:27 – 29). They used a Roman intimidation technique: a public sign over Jesus’ crucified body declaring that this is what will happen to anyone else who claimed to be ‘King of the Jews’ and defied the Roman Emperor (Mt.27:37). In between, we see all the elements of an execution squad which intended to humiliate Jesus as much as possible. The ‘whole Roman cohort’ (Mt.27:27) was the death squad. They stripped Jesus and mocked his claim to royalty by putting a scarlet robe on him (Mt.27:28), bending thorny branches into a crown and forcing it down upon his head (Mt.27:29), and giving him a thin stick as a mock scepter. They knelt down before him (Mt.27:29), probably not knowing what was more uproariously funny – either that this defeated man claimed to be a ‘king,’ or that the Jewish people were so pathetic that some actually put their hope in this weakling. Then they grabbed the thin stick and whacked him on the head with it, surely driving the thorns deeper. They forced another Jew, Simon of Cyrene, to carry Jesus’ cross for a short distance, once again mocking Rome’s power over Israel and mocking Jesus’ apparent powerlessness to prevent them from treating other Jews – his supposed subjects – this way. They crucified Jesus on that Roman cross, the torture device designed to stretch out a person’s death and make it as publicly humiliating as possible. The only act which had an iota of kindness was the offer of a narcotic drink that would have dulled his senses. Tellingly, Jesus refused that. He was going to be fully present.
Sixth, Jesus died. To be precise, he entered the realm of the dead. Human beings started to die because God exiled Adam and Eve from the garden. God did so because He did not want humans to eat from the tree of life in a corrupted state, and then make our sinfulness immortal. Death was a way to free human beings from the corruption of sin. So, while death may be the last enemy, it is a friend before it is an enemy. While the insights of 1 Peter 3:18 – 20 and 4:6, along with Ephesians 4:9, are not narrated in Matthew’s Gospel, his narration stresses Jesus’ solidarity with us in our death. Death, in Old Testament thought, is simply the last stage of the exile. Since Jesus shared in our exile, he also shared in our death.
Jesus recapitulated every way we rejected God before. We rejected God in the garden of Eden and sent ourselves into exile. Then, throughout the long history of Israel, the Jewish people rejected God over and over; they forsook God’s protection and sent themselves into exile. Now when God came in the flesh, in the person of His Son, Jesus, into the very place of Israel’s exile among the nations, then there was nowhere for us – Jew and Gentile – to run any more. There was no other place to escape his claim of authority over us and his call to partnership with him. So we threw God into the exile which we could manufacture. We put all the elements of exile onto Him. We made a parody of a kingly coronation and crowned him, in exile.
But this time, our rejection of God served His love for us. We exiled ourselves to get away from God. Jesus pursued us there. He entered our world for us, despite knowing that we will try to push Him out. But Jesus turns all the elements around him into an imaginative coronation scene. All the pieces are there: a military cohort acknowledging him, a crown on his head, a scepter in his hand, a royal robe on his shoulders, a subject who helps him hold his banner, a seat from which he can sit, enthroned, and see his subjects, and a sign publicly declaring his identity.
Jesus fully identified with, and entered, all the forlorn experiences of people from Adam and Eve onward, especially his people Israel. Even though he was innocent, Jesus took to himself all the experiences and symbols of his people’s exile. Jesus drew them onto himself, including death, in order to emerge on the other side of all that as God’s new humanity. As God, Jesus recapitulated the rejection human beings have always dealt God, rejecting Him at His most vulnerable moments, and slapping Him across His face – a face now incarnate and not anthropomorphic. God met us in our exile, and to repay Him, we further exiled Him.
Yet as a human being, Jesus recapitulated the faithful obedience unto the Father by the Spirit which we should have rendered. He lived the life we couldn’t live and died the death we couldn’t die – a virtuous death which served as a capstone over his long battle against the corruption of sin. He also died because his incarnation into human being and human experience was not yet complete; he needed to go into the realm of death because humans were waiting there for him, which is perhaps the most straightforward implication of Matthew’s intriguing detail that some dead people were resuscitated. Their souls returned to their bodies, because Jesus’ human soul, after leaving his dead body, went to the place of those souls, and offered them life. Since only a limited number of people were resuscitated, we presume, it makes some sense that those who were had been only very recently dead. This was a sign that Jesus’ ministry continued after his death. He recapitulated the full journey of human beings, even into the realm of the souls of the dead.
Conclusion: The Demeanor of God the Father
As I stated earlier, I believe John Stott should have treated Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22:1 as an intertextual reference. Jesus was invoking king David’s journey of exile before enthronement for the sake of those around him who thought that the messiah should not face death at Gentile hands. Jesus’ point is that if David suffered at the hands of the Gentiles (Ps.22), how much more would the heir of David? Unfortunately Stott does not even consider this.
As the wilderness temptation and the Garden of Gethsemane stories indicate, at the very moment when Jesus needed the strength and love of the Father the most – at his crucifixion and death – the Father was there with him and for him through the bond of the Spirit. The Father spoke a word of blessing and identity, gave the Spirit without measure, strengthened Jesus supernaturally, and gave Jesus the conviction to be victorious over sinfulness all the way to the end. The wrath of God did not pass from the Father upon the Son. It was not an inner-Trinitarian rupture of their relationship.
And so, perhaps the most troubling aspect of penal substitutionary atonement theory, the impression that the Father is a legalistic perfectionist who uses relational distancing and/or punitive action when he feels slighted for any reason whatsoever (every sin however small is an offense against an infinite being, and therefore deserves infinite punishment), is entirely avoided. In the union of the Father-Son relationship, and in the united action of the Trinity in the medical substitutionary atonement accomplished through the active, not passive, obedience of Jesus, we have a Father who is even within his Son, for something greater than the temple is here, to support and empower his Son to accomplish the greatest internal battle of the Son’s life, in the face of the greatest external suffering he had endured. And the Father sends the Son and the Spirit because we, in our sin, have committed acts of self-vandalism, and so damaged that which God loves the most: us. That damage needs to be undone, cut and burned away, with ruthless surgical precision in the human nature of every single person, so that every human being could become the bearer of God’s image and likeness which God always intended, and still loves.
[1] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.18.7
[2] Ibid 2.22.4; cf. 4.38.2
[3] See also Athanasius of Alexandria, Discourses Against the Arians 3.51 – 53 in his treatment of Luke 2:52
[4] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.18.7, emphasis mine; see also 2.12.4; 3.18.1; 5.1.3
[5] See Mako A. Nagasawa, Isaiah 53 Series: https://newhumanityinstitute.wordpress.com/atonement-foundations-isaiah-53-new-humanity-institute/ especially Matthew’s Quotation of Isaiah 53:4 and Isaiah’s Understanding of Israel’s Sacrificial Animals
[6] See Mako A. Nagasawa, Literary Analysis of the Pentateuch: http://newhumanityinstitute.org/pdfs/article-pentateuch-chiasm.pdf. In brief, God had wanted Israel to come up onto the mountain (Ex.19:13; Dt.5:5) and to encounter Him like Moses did (Ex.34). This might have made them a ‘temple-people.’ Since they did not, they became a people with a temple.