Chapter 8: the First-Level Fulfillment—Exile and Prophetic Hope

Scripture Passages

Ezekiel 36:22-35
Ezekiel 37:1-14, 24-28
Isaiah 65:17-25

All Downhill from There

In the previous chapter, we looked at the Davidic covenant. We saw that God swore an oath to David, just as he had sworn an oath to Abraham—an unconditional guarantee of blessing and the promise of a coming Seed. The Davidic covenant is really an extension of the Abrahamic covenant. And therefore, just as the Abrahamic covenant was fulfilled in two stages—the provisional fulfillment in Israel, and the ultimate fulfillment in Christ—so it is with the Davidic covenant.

The kingdom promised in the Davidic covenant comes in provisional glory in the time of David’s son, Solomon. The first 10 chapters of 1 Kings present the glory and the grandeur of Solomon’s reign.

1 Kings 4:20-21, 25: “Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea. They ate and drank and were happy. ²¹ Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt. They brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life …. ²⁵ And Judah and Israel lived in safety, from Dan even to Beersheba, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, all the days of Solomon.”

The pinnacle of Solomon’s glory is the construction of the temple, which took 7 years to build. After Solomon brought up the ark of the covenant and dedicated the temple, the glory of God filled the temple, and God’s holy realm, God’s kingdom, was complete. This is narrated in 1 Kings 5-8.

Then, in chapter 9 God reminds Solomon that all the blessings and the glory of this kingdom are contingent upon his faithfulness to keep the Mosaic Law. God reminds him of what he had said to his father David, that God would establish his kingdom, but only if Solomon obeys God’s Law. “But,” he goes on to say, “if you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, ⁷ then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples” (1 Kings 9:6-7). This warning sounds a negative note—a negative note that is merely a foreshadow of what is to come.

After ten glorious chapters describing Solomon’s glory as God’s vassal-king, we come to 1 Kings 11:1, “Now King Solomon loved many foreign women,” and it is all downhill from there. Solomon multiplies foreign wives, and his heart is led astray into idolatry as he builds altars on the high places for his wives to worship their pagan deities. Solomon violates the Mosaic covenant. As a consequence of Solomon’s failure to keep the Mosaic Law, the kingdom is divided into the northern and the southern kingdoms.

The Ministry of the Prophets

At this point a very important development occurs in the history of God’s covenantal kingdom. God raises up his servants the prophets. The function of the prophets was to be the prosecutors of God’s covenant lawsuit against his faithless and rebellious people. In essence, their message was this: God’s holy realm will be removed from God’s unholy people because of the disobedience of God’s vassal-kings. As the prosecutors of the covenant lawsuit, the prophets upheld the claims of the Mosaic covenant, reminding Israel of the curses of the covenant that were soon to follow unless God’s people repented. Elijah is the first major prosecutor of the covenant lawsuit. He comes on the scene in 1 Kings 17, and announces to King Ahab that the curses of Deuteronomy 28 are about to be fulfilled. Elijah, the Spirit-filled wild man from Gilead, announces judgment: “There shall be neither dew nor rain for the next three years” (1 Kings 17:1; cp. Deut 28:23-24).

After Elijah, God raises up many prophets to succeed him. Time and time again, God sent word to his people by his messengers to warn them that they must repent and return to the Lord. But the kings of Israel were totally apostate, and the kings of Judah were mostly bad, with a few exceptions (e.g., Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah and a few others).

“They kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, until there was no remedy” (2 Chronicles 36:16). What tragic words!

We get some idea of what this means when we look at the book of Hosea, where God confronts the northern kingdom of Israel, and declares them to be no longer his people. Their apostasy is irrevocable. Remember that Hosea was told to marry a prostitute, which was symbolic of the fact that God had married an unfaithful bride, Israel. And Hosea has three children by the prostitute. The first is named Jezreel, “for,” God says, “I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel.” The second is named “Lo Ruhamah” which means “Not pitied” (Hosea 1:4, 6). The name of the third child is the most frightening. You remember the formula which defined the covenant relationship: “You shall be my people, and I will be your God.” In an ironic reversal of the covenant formula, Hosea’s third child is called “Lo Ammi” which means, “Not my people” (Hosea 1:9). “My people” is called “Not my people.” The covenant relation between God and his people has been canceled. The covenant has come to an end. God is now preparing to drive the people away from his presence. (Cp. Jeremiah 11:1-11)

Notice that this severing of the covenant bond demonstrates that the Mosaic covenant is a conditional covenant of works. The threatened curses of the Mosaic Covenant are not hypothetical but real. It is precisely because of those threats, that Israel is brought to the great crisis-point of the exile, when God cast off his people. Just as Adam, the first vassal-king, disobeyed God and forfeited the kingdom, so most of the kings of Israel and Judah failed to obey God. As a result, they forfeited the kingdom that God had bestowed upon Israel. First the Assyrians came in 722 BC and brought the northern kingdom to an end, then the Babylonians came in 586 BC and did the same to the southern kingdom of Judah. They destroyed the temple of God and took the king and his people into captivity. The kingdom of God was taken away.

But the covenant lawsuit and the message of doom was not the only message of the prophets. For not only were they mediators of the Mosaic covenant, they were also ministers of the more fundamental promise of grace. Remember, the promise was given 430 years prior to the Law. This is the oath that God swore to Abraham. And it is this oath which impels a forward movement beyond the exile to the hope of an eschatological outpouring of grace that will recreate Israel under a new covenant. Alongside judgment there is a surprising, unexpected revelation that Yahweh in his grace will yet fulfill his ancient promises.

Micah 7:18-20:

“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity

and passing over transgression

for the remnant of his inheritance?

He does not retain his anger forever,

because he delights in steadfast love.

¹⁹ He will again have compassion on us;

he will tread our iniquities underfoot.

You will cast all our sins

into the depths of the sea.

²⁰ You will show faithfulness to Jacob

and steadfast love to Abraham,

as you have sworn to our fathers

from the days of old.”

The sovereign election of Israel in the promises to Abraham and in the exodus is irrevocable and will not fail. God will see his grand redemptive intentions through to their final goal, in spite of Israel’s covenant-breaking and apostasy.

The Remnant

In Isaiah, God will pour out his wrath on the nation as a whole, but he will preserve a remnant. “Destruction is decreed, overflowing with righteousness,” yet “a remnant of them will return” (Isa 10:20-23). Just as the Israelites came up out of the land of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea, so he will stretch out his hand a second time to part the waters of the Euphrates so that “the remnant that remains” may return from Babylon to the land (Isa 11:11-16). This is the hope of a new exodus. “The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads” (Isa 35:10).

But it must not be assumed that the remnant is righteous and for that reason is spared. Just as the first exodus was a ransoming of a sinful people, redeeming them from sin and bondage, so the new exodus will be an act of divine grace. In Ezekiel, God’s wrath is so total, Ezekiel fears that even the remnant will be destroyed, and so he plaintively cries out to the Lord, “Will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” (Ezek 9:8; 11:13). In spite of appearances, the answer is no, he will not make a full end of the remnant. Yet a remnant is not spared because some in Israel were found to be without sin and righteous enough to continue to inherit God’s holy land. The only reason there is a remnant at all is because of God’s grace. “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance?” (Micah 7:18). The underlying promises of the covenant of grace are responsible for preserving a remnant. The nation under the law as a covenant of works would be erased from the earth with not a single Israelite left, but the people are not totally destroyed under the curse of the law because of God’s “steadfast love to Abraham, as he swore … from days of old” (Micah 7:20).

Ezekiel 37

But how? The situation seems utterly hopeless. The depravity of man is so great that the Law will never be fulfilled if it depends upon man to do it. What the Law is powerless to do, God will do. This emphasis on the sovereignty of God in the fulfillment of the promises is brought out in the prophetic writings with great emphasis, particularly in Ezekiel.

Ezekiel 36:22-28

God is going to restore the kingdom of God to Israel, not for Israel’s sake, but for the sake of his holy name, in order to prove himself holy in the sight of the nations. God is going to get all the glory. He is going to make it clear that Israel’s restoration is not due to Israel somehow repenting and changing their ways, but is due only to his sovereign power. God is going to change their hearts by his sovereign grace. This is brought out even more clearly in the next chapter, where the restoration of Israel is pictured as a literal resurrection from the dead.

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Israel has violated God’s holy Law. As a result, the people of God were dead, slain by God’s holy Law with its dreadful curses of judgment. Israel is now pictured as a vast army whose lifeless carcasses are scattered over the ground. There is no life left. But the same Yahweh who had elected Israel in his sovereign grace and had promised his unchanging love to them, would bring the dry bones to life through a new act of creation. The breathing into the dead bones in Ezekiel 37 harks back to God’s fashioning of Adam and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. God is creating a holy people to dwell in his holy realm. The holy people who dwell in the land are a renewed nation, whose hearts have been transformed so that they will be an obedient people. They are an eschatological humanity, a new creation, once dead and slain by the Law, but now made alive by the resurrection power of God.

God’s holy people in God’s holy realm—that is the kingdom of God. But what about the final piece of the puzzle—God’s obedient vassal-king, through whom all these blessings will be obtained?

Ezekiel 37:21-27

Why will Israel and Judah dwell securely in the land, in God’s holy realm promised to Abraham? Because God will have raised up for David a righteous Branch, a king who will give God’s people a new heart, causing them to keep God’s statutes and ordinances. The kingdom of God will not fail after all, for it will be entrusted to a king whose one outstanding characteristic will be righteousness. According to the prophet Jeremiah, he will be called, “The Lord our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:5-6).

But it is not a righteousness kept only for himself. It is a righteousness that he possesses as the covenant head of the nation, so that on the legal basis of his righteousness, God’s holy people will dwell securely in God’s holy realm. Never again will God’s people be cast out of the land. Notice that the word “forever” occurs four times in the last few verses of Ezekiel 37: “They will live on the land, they, and their sons and their son’s sons, forever; and David My servant will be their prince forever” (v. 25), and “I will set My sanctuary in their midst forever” (v. 26; again in v. 28).

Prophetic Idiom

Acts 3:21 is an important text for understanding what the prophets were fundamentally speaking of when they looked ahead to God’s future purposes. The context is the story of the healing of the lame man who was begging at the temple gate. Peter and John were going up to the temple to pray and they encountered a man who had been lame from birth. When he asked alms from the apostles, Peter said he had no silver or gold to offer, but what he did have was healing in the name of Jesus Christ. When the man was healed, he leapt up and began walking in the temple, praising God. When the people saw it they were amazed. When a crowd began to form, Peter preached the gospel to them. At one point in his message, he spoke of the Messiah, “whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time” (Acts 3:21 NASB). This statement provides us with the interpretive key for understanding the prophetic literature. We tend to view their prophecies as bound to the limited horizon of the restoration of Israel in the land, but according to Peter, they were actually speaking about “the restoration of all things,” that is, the final consummation.

Kline helps us with this when he explains that the prophets spoke in what he calls “prophetic idiom.” What this means is that when the prophets spoke of the consummation, they described it in language drawn from the earthly horizon of their embodied experience of national Israel in the land. The idiom in which the prophets spoke was temporally and geographically limited. But they were using that limited idiom to speak of the cosmic eschatological consummation. Kline also calls it typological idiom: The OT “prophecies … depict the second level kingdom in the typological idiom of the first level model” (Kingdom Prologue, 341). They depicted the unlimited antitype through the medium of the limited type. Similarly, Herman Ridderbos said the prophets “painted with the palette” of their experience (The Coming of the Kingdom, 525).

This phenomenon of prophetic idiom is rooted in the two-level fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham that we have discussed in previous chapters. The Abrahamic promise is fulfilled in two stages, a preliminary stage that is a prototype, and a consummate stage that is the true fulfillment of which the preliminary fulfillment was only the type and shadow. This fundamental structure of redemptive history sets up a whole series of types that provide the conceptual metaphors for understanding the fulfillment. The people of Israel as a holy nation, the land, the temple, the line of Davidic kings—all these belong to the first level fulfillment. But because the first-level fulfillment is a comprehensive typological system of inter-related covenantal and eschatological elements, these things are also types of the true realities to come. The antitype is the eschatological reality to which the type pointed. And so when the prophets looked ahead to the eschatological reality, they used the language of the system of types at the first-level fulfillment to describe it. The typological kingdom provided a storehouse of images and metaphors with which to speak, in prophetic idiom, of the coming eschatological fulfillment at the second level. The land was a prototype of the renewed cosmos, the heavenized new creation. The first-level fulfillment was a smaller-scale prototype or model of the second-level fulfillment in the new creation. The prophets therefore described the new creation in language taken from the more limited horizon of Israel’s experience in the land.

Let’s look at some examples.

Amos 9:11

In Amos 9:11, the prophet Amos looks ahead to the day when God restores the Davidic dynasty that had seemingly been cut down when the last king, Zedekiah, was taken into Babylonian Captivity. Amos writes: “In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.” This doesn’t mean that in the consummation the house of David will be restored in a first-level sense with a continuation of merely human kings who die and are succeeded by their sons. James, the brother of our Lord, said this was fulfilled in the resurrection of Christ (Acts 15:13-20). We see the same prophetic idiom concerning the king in Ezekiel 37:24-25. “My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd.” Clearly, the name “David” here is prophetic idiom for Jesus Christ. It is not as though the Messiah will literally be David come back from the dead. The Messiah is David’s son, but he is far greater than David. What about the statement that in that day “They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes”? This is prophetic idiom for Christ’s active obedience in fulfillment of the law, which gives us the right to dwell in the land. “They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived.” The land is the renewed world, the new creation.

Micah 4:1-5

Micah 4 begins with the phrase, “It shall come to pass in the latter days.” These opening words identify the prophecy as eschatological, as belonging to “the latter days” of eschatological fulfillment. But as we look at the description of what will take place in those days, we know that Mount Zion will not literally be the highest mountain on the earth, nor will the nations literally go to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. In fact, in the fulfillment, the direction is changed: the apostles went out from Jerusalem to Samaria to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8). The nations did not come to Jerusalem, but the apostles went out from Jerusalem bringing the gospel to Gentile lands. We can also be sure that the nations will not literally follow the original Mosaic Law in exhaustive detail, nor will they literally beat their swords into plowshares, nor will every man literally sit under his vine and his fig tree. But war and poverty shall be no more and there will be universal peace and happiness in the new creation.

Zechariah 14

Zechariah 14 is another prophetic vision of the consummation containing prophetic idiom that must be translated into the eschatological register. The geographical limitations described in vv 10-11 (“from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem,” etc.) do not mean that the new heavens and the new earth will be circumscribed within the literal boundaries of the promised land. The plagues with which God will strike any nation that wages war against Jerusalem (v 12) are likewise not to be taken literally. There will not be any war or plague in the new creation. The assertion that “year after year,” the nations will do pilgrimage to Jerusalem to keep the Feast of Booths (v 16), is also prophetic idiom. The statement that there will be no rain for nations that don’t do annual pilgrimage, especially for Egypt, is to be interpreted typologically in light of the curses of the old covenant. According to Deut 28:12 and 23, rain is one of the blessings and drought is one of the curses of the covenant. Zechariah sates that “every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holy to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and take of them and boil the meat of the sacrifice in them” (v 21a). Will there be literal holy pots and sacrifices in the consummation? No, but the holiness of the temple will be cosmic, as all creation is consecrated to God as his holy dwelling place. The declaration, “There will no longer be a Canaanite [or a trader, ESV] in the house of the Lord of hosts” (v 21b), must be interpreted typologically as meaning that all evil and all sinners will be banished from the eschatological kingdom of glory, for God is going to create a new heavens and a new earth “in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13). “Nothing unclean will ever enter [the New Jerusalem], not anyone who does what is detestable or false” (Rev 21:27).

Isaiah 65:17-25

Another key passage illustrating the concept of prophetic idiom is Isaiah 65:17-25. It begins in v 17 with a wonderful promise: “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.” There can be no doubt that this refers to the consummation of all things, since this oracle is quoted or alluded to twice in the NT (2 Peter 3:13; Rev 21:1). In the next verse, “I will create Jerusalem to be a delight,” we begin to see geographical limitation, but it is not too hard to see this as cosmic and eschatological, since we are familiar with the image of the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:2). But as the verses progress, we start to get more head-scratching statements. For example, we read in verse 20, “The one who fails to reach a hundred [years of age] will be considered accursed.” But this too is the typological way of speaking of the eternal life of the resurrected saints. As we saw in Zechariah 14, it alludes to the covenant curses of Deut 27-28. We may transpose this prophetic idiom into the idiom of the eschatological fulfillment by quoting Paul: “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Cor 15:50). What about verse 21, “They will plant vineyards and eat their fruit”? This stands in contrast to the curse of Deut 28:30, “You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not enjoy its fruit.” The promise that God’s people “will not labor in vain” is quoted by Paul in 1 Cor 15:58. And the next line, “nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune,” simply expands on that thought, although we know there will be no literal marriage and procreation in the new creation. Finally, the well-known promise that “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox” (v 25), means that even in the animal kingdom, eschatological peace will reign.

Critique of Dispensationalism

Kline uses this concept of prophetic idiom in his critique of Dispensationalism. Dispensationalism fails to recognize that the first level fulfillment (Israel as a theocratic nation in the land) as a whole is a type of the second level fulfillment in Christ. “The difference between the dispensational and covenantal hermeneutics is sometimes described as one of literal versus figurative exegesis.” But this “obscure[s] the precise nature of the difference between these two approaches” (Kingdom Prologue, 341). The difference is that Dispensationalism has a “nontypological” understanding of Israel as a nation (people, land, temple, king). Because of their failure to see Israel as “a typal kingdom” (Kline’s phrase)—that is, as a kingdom that God established to be a prefiguration or prototype of the eschatological kingdom of the new creation—dispensationalists are convinced that God is going to repeat the whole first-level kingdom in the millennium, as if that is the only way it can be said that God is truly faithful to the Abrahamic promise.

The Newness of the Prophetic Hope

Fundamentally, the prophets announced that God would fulfill the promises he made to Abraham. But they did not merely envision a return to the past. They looked ahead to a new work of God in which God would fulfill the promises in a new and unexpected way. He wouldn’t merely restore Israel to the land and rebuild the temple. There would be something far greater, something that would totally blow the old wine skins out of the water and fill new wine skins with new wine.

First, God will make a new covenant (Jer 31:31-34). It is an everlasting covenant because it will never be brought to an end like the old covenant that was inaugurated at Sinai. Why is that? Because the new covenant will be administered by the righteous Branch, the Messianic King from the line of David. Remember, the Mosaic Covenant was given for the king to keep. When the old line of kings descended from Solomon could not keep that Old Mosaic Covenant, and that Covenant expired at the time of the exile, having spent itself through its exhaustive curse—then a new king must arise. And if there is a new king, then a new covenant must be given for the king to administer.

Second, God will create a new humanity. “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6). The new covenant won’t just be for the house of Israel and the house of Judah, but for the Gentiles as well. God is going to fulfill the promise he made back in Genesis 12:3, when he said to Abraham: “In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” In Genesis, God’s promises to Abraham were presented as the divine solution to the Fall of mankind in the garden. When, therefore, God says he is going to fulfill those promises in a restored Israel under a new covenant, the fulfillment is not merely the solution to Israel’s exile but ultimately the solution to humanity’s problem of being banished from the garden. Just as Israel’s fall recapitulates the Fall of man, so Israel’s restoration is the salvation of the world.

Third, God will bring about a new creation (Isaiah 65:17-25). God isn’t merely interested in restoring Israel to the land. He is going to remake the creation into a new heaven and a new earth, as the eternal dwelling place for the new humanity under the new covenant.

The ministry of the prophets looks beyond the horizons of Israel to an eschatological fulfillment that is so great, it can only be fulfilled in Christ. This is why God says through Isaiah, “Do not call to mind the former things, or ponder things of the past. Behold, I will do something new … the former things will not be remembered or come to mind” (Isaiah 43:18-19a; 65:17b).

Kline References

Kingdom Prologue, 326-355.

Discussion Questions

What do you think was the purpose of God in the downfall of Israel and the exile?
Do you think the prophets themselves understood their own prophetic or typological idiom? Consider Matt 13:17 and 1 Peter 1:10-12.
What does Dispensationalism believe to be the true and final fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise, the sine qua non, that without which it would not be the fulfillment? Critique that view.