Jesus represents his people, as Israel’s Messiah, and so he and he alone can appropriately be their substitute. And it is through that substitution, both national (as in the gospel as a whole) and personal (as in the exchanges in chap. 23), that the larger reality comes about. Jesus, by taking upon himself the weight of Israel’s sins and thereby of the world’s sins, dies under the accumulated force of evil, so that now at last the kingdom can come in its fullness. He had anticipated this in his public career. Now, through his royal, representative, and substitutionary death he “comes into his
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