Quotes about Messiah

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

What Paul is saying is that the gospel, through which people receive the divine gift, reconstitutes them as genuine humans, as those who share the "reign" of the Messiah.

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible" and its own great narrative. We are not at liberty to replace this with narratives of our own.

Israel's hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel's long-awaited Messiah.

Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel's Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused "exile" in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus's sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, "Sin" was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free.

His analysis here is the subsequent reflection of one who has come to believe that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah.

Thus, whether on the large scale — where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel's representative status in God's purposes) for the world — or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either 'victory' or 'substitution'. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.

The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

There is no condemnation for those in the Messiah . . . because God . . . condemned Sin right there in the flesh." The punishment has been meted out. But the punishment is on Sin itself, the combined, accumulated, and personified force that has wreaked such havoc in the world and in human lives.

The revolution of the cross sets us free to be the royal priesthood, and the only thing stopping us is our lack of vision and our failure to realize that this was why the Messiah died in the first place.

But if the "servant" is indeed the "arm of YHWH" under the guise of a suffering, bruised, and unrecognizable Israelite, then a new possibility emerges at the heart of Romans 3:21—26. The primary fault of the human race, according to Romans 1, is idolatry. The primary response, from the one God himself, is to "put forth" the Messiah as the place of meeting, the ultimate revelation of the divine righteousness and love.