Gods Plan of Salvation | Page 8

sin-
problem. We should remember that his teaching was
replete with the Kingdom of God (or heaven). Although
the fullness of the Kingdom waits for that day when God
makes his final intervention, yet those who believe in
Jesus- both Jew and Gentile live in the Kingdom- yet still
in the world. It is a 'now-but-not-yet' situation- a 'realised
eschatology'. At that last day the heavenly Assize will
pronounce a positive verdict for believers in Jesus- and
for them that verdict is already applied- which is
'justification' with a much wider emphasis than a purely
individualistic moral issue. Sin is dealt with by God's wider
plan, which includes the Cross; includes forgiveness of
sin; includes the propitiation of God's wrath. So the
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Kingdom today is worked out by the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit in the believer, and his membership of the church-
in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, for in the Cross
the 'middle wall' of hostility was broken down (Eph 2:14-
16). And in the church, we become God's co-workers in
forwarding his plan.
From what we have just considered, I would like to pick
one or two points to develop a little more fully.
Jesus was the faithful Jew. God's original promise to
Abraham was that his seed would bring blessing, actually
repeating the promise of Gen 3:15 is implicit in Gen
17:11-13:
“You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign
of the covenant between me and you. For the generations
to come every male among you who is eight days old
must be circumcised, including those born in your
household or bought with money from a foreigner—those
who are not your offspring. W hether born in your
household or bought with your money, they must be
circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an
everlasting covenant.”
As the faithful Jew, he was the only one who could bring
the promised blessing to fulfilment. In fact, because the
blessings of God in putting-all-right was through Israel,
the blessing would flow out to all Israel; the fact is the
Jews failed to see this. God's intent is made clear by
Kenneth Bailey who wrote this
In (Micah 6:3-5) God reviews his past mighty acts to save Israel and
calls on them to remember all he has done for them. The declared
purpose of this recollection is that "you may know the sedaqot
(righteousness) of the Lord"........The great saving acts not only
deliver Israel, they also grant to her a new status. 7

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Natural Israel failed to see this. Their fixation on political
deliverance, compounded their hard-heartedness so that
they missed what was going on.
W right shows how Jesus confronted this sin head-on:
God (had) deliberately given the Torah, to be the means of
concentrating the sin of humankind in one place, namely, in his
people Israel-in order that it might then be concentrated yet further,
drawn together on Israel's representative, the Messiah, in order that it
might dealt with once and for all 8
The Torah had in fact had the effect of concentrating the
curse of sin on those to whom Torah had been given, and
Jesus was the only one born under the law, who (being
without sin) could free them from the curse. That is the
point behind Gal 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the
curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is
written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole” (Did
the Jews have Deut 21:23 (to which Galatians refers)
when they asked the bodies to be taken down from the
Cross?
Secondly, Jesus redefined the 'People-of-promise', to
include Gentile as well as Jew. And those people-of-
promise would now be those in God's Kingdom which
Jesus had announced, about which he preached. We
note the words of John Stott
Jesus, in proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom was also announcing
the end of exile....As Jesus walked from village to village,he
summoned people to repent....and accept his radical counter-
agenda......Thus Israel was being redefined and reconstituted, with
the twelve Apostles as the nucleus and with Jesus as its centre 9
Then, the coming of the Kingdom; the victory of the Cross
meant that Israel, still in exile, was, in the person of Jesus
the Messiah freed from exile. There is a double-take here
because, since the Cross took place at Passover there
was also the backward look to deliverance from Egypt.
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Had not John Baptist pronounced Jesus the Lamb of
God? (John 1:36)
I intend to deal with re-definition of the People-of-promise,
but first I intend to see another aspect of Jesus more fully:
as our Great High Priest.
The OT prophets, notably Jeremiah had promised a new
covenant.
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD,“when I will
make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with
the