Excerpt from Holiness in Fresh Perspective: Covenant, Cross, and Kingdom (Wipf and Stock, expected 2015).
Flowing directly from the complete obedience of the Messiah comes our final and most important point about the life of Jesus and that is the life of Jesus as the True Israel. We said in the previous chapter that the Torah was designed to reveal the character of God as well as the sinfulness of humanity. The Torah was successful in revealing the sinfulness of humanity, however, it failed in revealing the holy character of God to the world because of Israel’s disobedience. Not only this, but also because of the tragedy of Israel the Kingdom of God had yet to come in its fullness. In this sense, the Torah was not able to complete what it set out to do. Jesus, as the Living Torah, puts on display for the entire world to see the holiness of God. It is through the life of Jesus that this is accomplished.
All of the features of power through obedience evidence this reality. Through the special empowerment of the Holy Spirit given to the Messiah, the Messiah not only is endowed with special ability to fulfill his vocation, but the anointing of the Holy Spirit authorizes him as the window into the divine character; as The One who truly manifests the characteristics of the One True God, the God of Israel.
This reality comes through in sonship language used to describe the messiah in the Old Testament. The Messiah is no ordinary king (which we already saw through the example of how “power” translates into the Kingdom of God through the Messiah), he is the King of Israel whose patron deity is the God of the Universe. Because of this, there is a connotation that the king, being the preeminent one, would represent God’s reign to his people. In doing so, the king had to reflect the nature and character of God especially as it pertains to ruling and governance. What we are talking about here is the same that we talked about in previous chapters about the vocational dimension of the image of God in humanity. The image of God in humanity was intended to be the point of calibration for human behavior as the privileges ones who are to reign in the created world out of divine wisdom and love. In much the same way, the anointing of the Holy Spirit of God on the King is intended to manifest the image of God in the king. If the king is the Messiah, the chosen one, then the king can be conceptualized as the “Son of God”; the one who bears God’s image.
This is the idea behind what we read in Psalm 2:7 when we hear the voice of the chosen one say, “I will tell of the decree: the Lord said to me, You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” The King of God’s chosen people is the Son of God in the sense that he represents God’s holy character through kingdom ruling on behalf of the patron deity.
This concept, however, takes on a literal dimension with Jesus himself. Jesus is the actual begotten Son of God. As Paul points out, Jesus true identity as the Son of God is ultimately revealed through his resurrection. Paul says in Romans 1:3–4, “concerning his Son who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection form the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…”. The Roman centurion even came to realize this before the resurrection as at the moment of Jesus’ death he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).