Understanding the Whole Bible Pt. 6: The Cross

This is Part 6 in our Understanding the Whole Bible series.

The Story so far...

Which brings us to the crucifixion of Jesus:

In Part 5 we saw that as the ultimate representative of God (the ultimate "image of God") Jesus fulfills the calling of Israel's priests, prophets, kings, the nation of Israel itself, and all of humanity. All God's plans and intentions implemented in the Old Testament come together in Jesus.

In this post we'll look at how Jesus is not only the ultimate image of God, he is also the ultimate "image of humanity". Here we pick up the discussion we started back in Part 3. There we saw that there is a real sense in which Israel was not only called to represent God to humanity, but they also ended up embodying (representing) the sin and suffering of humanity.

So the representation not only runs this way:

It also runs this way:

A key idea for what we are about to talk about is that what is true for the representative is true for his people, and what is true for his people is true for the representative.

To make sure this idea is clear, let's look at a couple everyday examples. Back when I was a referee for children's soccer games, I would start a game by calling the team captain from each team to the middle of the field. The two team captains would play "Rock, Paper, Scissors" and whichever captain won determined which team starts the game with the ball. Here what the representative (the team captain) achieves applies to the group they represent (their team).

Another sports example. When a professional team plays poorly⁠—or even worse, behaves poorly⁠—their coach may feel embarrassed. Even if the coach knows he trained and prepared them the best he possibly could, he may still feel the embarrassment or defeat that his players feel. In a sense the shame of the group (the team) is transferred to their representative (the coach), even if it was not his fault.

Hopefully you see where I'm going with this!

If the sin and suffering of all humanity was in some sense collected and concentrated in the nation of Israel (as discussed in Part 3), then it is further collected and concentrated onto Jesus on the cross.

The bible is clear that Jesus is the representative human of all humans. Jesus often referred to himself as "the Son of Man", and Romans 5 describes him as a new or second Adam. It is very important to the author of Hebrews to establish that Jesus became an actual human so that he could redeem actual humans (Hebrews 2).

Likewise, Jesus is the representative of the nation of Israel, God's chosen people. The Gospels provide a number of subtle but relevant clues along these lines. For example, the Gospel of Matthew starts with a genealogy of Jesus that has 14 generations from Abraham to David, and another 14 generations from David to the Exile. Matthew is saying that Jesus sums up the entire story of Israel so far. Again, just like Israel went to Egypt, escaped through the waters of the Red Sea, and entered the desert, so Jesus went to Egypt (as an infant), passed through water (in baptism), and entered the desert (for 40 days of temptation from the devil). At the pivotal moment of all Jesus came to do—the cross—the sign hanging above him reads "King of the Jews."

And finally, Jesus represents all of Israel's heroes and leaders throughout the Old Testament. His genealogy is traced back to Abraham, he is the "seed" of Abraham (Galatians 3:16), and he brings the blessing that God promised to Abraham (e.g. Matthew 5:3-12). Jesus is called the "Son of David," creates a new "temple" like David did (John 2:21), and is the "Anointed One" (i.e. "Messiah") like David was. Jesus gives a set of 5 teachings in the Gospel of Matthew which parallels the first 5 books of the bible traditionally attributed to Moses, and rescues his people from slavery (Romans 6:18) like Moses did.

So to sum up, the bumpy and twisty story of everyone's failures or half-successful attempts at obeying God come together in Jesus, particularly Jesus on the cross.

All the stories of violence, betrayal, lust, manipulation, domination, selfishness—not to mention foolishness and confusion—that we read in the pages of the Old Testament get piled on him. All the times we hoped a character like Moses or David would be the hero Israel was waiting for, only to be disappointed by their failure—that disappointment points us to Jesus on the cross as well.

Because Jesus is the representative of us all, the sin in us gets applied to him. But that also means that when he overcomes sin and death on the cross, and the Father raises him from the dead, what is true of Jesus gets applied to us. Our salvation comes from the fact that Jesus was the ultimate representative of both God and humanity simultaneously.