Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ

by Trent Hunter

God speaks to us through what the authors wrote, which demands hard work from us to discern what the authors intended to say. Reading a given text in its close context means reading it in its literary and historical context.

Jesus tells the church at Laodicea that they are neither “hot” nor “cold” (3:15–16). How would they have heard this? As it turns out, Laodicea neighbored two cities, Hierapolis and Colossae. The hot springs of Hierapolis were of great medicinal value, while the cold springs of Colossae brought nourishment and refreshment. Laodicea, on the other hand, had a water supply that was lukewarm, tasteless, and useless. Unfortunately, the spiritual life of the church had become like her city’s water supply—lukewarm and useless.

In his return, he will bring the new creation in its fullness. In Revelation 21–22, the exalted Jesus gives John, his apostle, a symbolic vision of this future age, and it is beautiful to behold. Even now some of what John envisioned is present in Christ’s people, who are a new creation, a colony of the future age, although we still await the fullness of that new creation when Christ returns.

The story of Noah and his family bears some similarities to the original story of creation, giving us hints that this is a “restart” on creation.

God’s covenant with Noah is a reaffirmation of the foundational covenant with Adam and creation. Yet unlike the original covenant with Adam and creation, the Noahic covenant is established in the context of a fallen world subject to God’s judgment. Because of God’s promise to Noah, we know that God will graciously preserve creation and the created order of things until a day of judgment and the coming of a new creation, despite ongoing human sin and depravity.

The structure of God’s covenant with Moses included blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience,

Through the Davidic covenant, God’s promise is now focused on an individual: the king.

Yet as we soon witness, David and his sons disobey as well and fail, leaving God’s salvation promises in question, at least from a human perspective.

God’s covenants are unconditional and conditional. Some people divide the biblical covenants into either unconditional or conditional covenants, based on differences that were common in the Ancient Near East. But it’s not as simple as dividing or categorizing the biblical covenants in this way. It’s best to think of the biblical covenants as consisting of both unconditional and conditional elements. On the one hand, each covenant is unconditional and unilateral because of God’s gracious initiative to redeem and to keep his own promises. On the other hand, each covenant is conditional because it involves a human partner who is called to obey God. God, as our Creator and Lord, demands perfect love, loyalty, and obedience, which highlights the conditional aspect of each covenant.

Peter refers to baptism as an “antitype” of Noah’s flood (1 Peter 3:18–22).

Adam and Eve experienced firsthand the fourfold effects of sin. Vertically, they experienced alienation and condemnation from God. Horizontally, they experienced alienation from each other. Internally (and schizophrenically), they experienced alienation within themselves. Cosmically, they experienced alienation in the world they were created to rule.

Here’s an important lesson we learn: God’s covenant with Noah is not a covenant that begins with Noah but a covenant that is extended through Noah, one originally made with Adam. In Scripture, covenants are either started or extended. “To cut a covenant” refers to when the covenant begins, while the word that means “to establish a covenant” describes when it is extended. Although the word covenant first appears in God’s dealings with Noah, this mention of the covenant hints at something earlier. When God says to Noah, “I will establish my covenant with you,” he is not referring to the start of something new but indicating to Noah that what he began with Adam, he is continuing through Noah.

From Noah to the end of the age, God will allow for the simultaneous existence of two kingdoms. There will be the kingdom of man, but it will be set in opposition to the kingdom of God.

Noah also teaches us that God will need to do the saving completely.

There is that crucial phrase, “but I took.” Nothing in Abraham’s heritage or religious practice merited the Lord’s call on his life. He was just another man living as his father before him had lived, worshiping other gods. Abraham was not a righteous man or uniquely inclined toward love for God.

The promise of land in Canaan was a first installment on something even better—an entirely new creation. Abraham seems to have some sense that God was doing something new and of cosmic importance through him. “By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:9–10). We must remember that God isn’t a territorial deity. His people will fill his earth. The author of Hebrews describes the kind of city Abraham looked forward to: “a better country—a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16).

five aspects of the Law: its context, center, content, consequences, and culmination.

Israel functions in a similar role to Adam in relationship to God and God’s global purposes. As a nation, the people are to image and represent God. Furthermore, as a son is to a father, so Israel is to God. This relationship shapes Moses’ appeal to Pharaoh: “This is what the LORD says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me” ’ ” (Ex. 4:22–23).

The Bible tells us that when Moses came down from meeting with God, his face was shining, or radiant (Ex. 34:29–35). What must that have looked like? What must it have felt like to speak directly with God? By God’s design, Moses’ face shone for the people and for us so that we might know what it means to speak with God. Under Moses, this glory was dangerous. Moses had to cover his face with a veil to protect his people because they were stiff-necked. Moses himself saw only the tail end of the trail of God’s glory, but the people could not survive longer than a glance at the glow left on Moses’ face. How wonderful, then, to read these words about Jesus and his work for us: Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull . . . whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit . . . For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. —2 CORINTHIANS 3:12–14A, 16–18; 4:6

But in Genesis 49:10 a glimpse is given of how God’s promises to Abraham will be fulfilled through the king: The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his. —GENESIS 49:10 This promise helps make sense of why David’s rule is understood through the lens of the Abrahamic promises. God’s king would come from the tribe of Judah, and his rule would be eternal and universal over all people. The Bible continually hints that this rule would include gentiles. For example, God included Ruth, a believing gentile, in the king’s line.

When Solomon follows “other gods” and his “heart had turned away from the LORD,” the Lord promised to “tear the kingdom” from him, but not without this qualification: “Nevertheless, for the sake of David your father, I will not do it during your lifetime. I will tear it out of the hand of your son . . . I will give one tribe to his son so that David my servant may always have a lamp before me in Jerusalem, the city where I chose to put my Name” (1 Kings 11:9–12, 36). Likewise, when Abijah reigned over Judah and “committed all the sins his father had done before him” because “his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his forefather had been,” then “for David’s sake the LORD his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem by raising up a son to succeed him” (15:3–4). And when Jehoram was king of Judah, “he did evil in the eyes of the LORD. Nevertheless, for the sake of his servant David, the LORD was not willing to destroy Judah. He had promised to maintain a lamp for David and his descendants forever” (2 Kings 8:18–19).

This new covenant is universal in several ways. First, it is universal in the sense that everyone in this covenant knows the Lord: “No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (31:34). God’s covenant through Moses included those who savingly knew the Lord and many who did not. Infant children circumcised at birth, for example, did not know the Lord in a saving way at their circumcision. The boundaries for the Abrahamic covenant were ethnic, tied to Abraham’s physical descendants. The new covenant will be composed of those who savingly know the Lord, people born of the Spirit who are circumcised in heart. This covenant is also universal in its fulfillment of the international intentions of the Abrahamic covenant.

Earlier we summarized the prophets’ message of judgment in four ways: the Lord will deport his people, divorce them, desert his temple, and destroy their city. Thankfully, for each aspect of judgment there is a corresponding aspect of salvation.

Mary’s heart overflowed in rejoicing with a song whose themes of promise and reversal echoed Hannah’s prayer before her (Luke 1:46–55).

helps us to understand why the Spirit leads the Son into the wilderness to be tempted in the first place. The answer: to show that Jesus succeeds where everyone else—Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Israel, David—has failed. Jesus’ obedience shows us that the salvation he brings is secure.

Peter is telling the people that what they are hearing is the sound of Jesus Christ reigning from his throne! The crucified Jesus is now risen from the dead, seated at the Father’s right hand, and from his throne has poured out the Spirit upon his people. This was the sound of God’s new creation breaking into the world: first to individuals and then to constitute a new people, the church.

We, however, not only look back to those who were exiles before us and follow their example by trusting all of God’s promises but also have greater confidence because Christ has come and will come again. Even now, as we await the consummation of the age, we begin to live as God’s new creation, knowing that the finality of our inheritance is certain. As Paul wrote, “Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:20). The more faithfully we wait together, the more ready we will be. Jesus is reigning in heaven, every Christian is a stranger in this age, and the church is a community of Christ’s exiles who now participate in Christ’s reign.

The new creation has come in a person in Jesus. In the church it has come in a people. Now we await its consummation in a place.

Apocalyptic literature is like an onion. Books written in this genre have many layers.7 In the textual layer we have the inspired and God-given text Jesus ensured John would write. We read about a slain lamb on the throne, for example. The visionary layer is what John actually saw: a slain lamb on a throne. The referent layer is the reality represented in what John saw. John may see a lamb in his vision, and that lamb is Christ. Yet Christ isn’t a physical lamb. Finally, there’s the significance layer. That Christ is pictured as a lamb on the throne means that his victory and rule were established through his substitutionary death.

What will we see? God’s world, remade and stunning. John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and interestingly, it doesn’t have a sea. In the ancient world, the sea symbolized chaos and trouble. To say that the new creation does not have a sea is not to say there is no water there, but it is to say that all disorder, chaos, and trouble are gone!

The entire city is pictured as a perfect cube that is also co-extensive with the entire new creation. The only place we find a perfect cube in Scripture is the holy of holies in the temple, the place where God uniquely manifested his covenantal presence.