What If We Expected God to Show Up and He Did?

If anyone has ever expected God to show up, well God has done just that. All our expectations about God are fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

Recently I got into a discussion about N.T. Wright. A friend pointed me to a Trevin Wax review of Wright’s Simply Good News. Our discussion was really more about the mention of another book from the same author, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

Wax observed that “While the “old / new perspective” on justification may get the lion’s share of attention, the lasting contribution of this volume may be Wright’s defense of Paul’s high Christology. He makes a persuasive historical case that, from the beginning, the early Christians saw Jesus as Yahweh come to His people. What Wright did to bolster our historical confidence in Christ’s bodily resurrection, he has now done for early Christianity’s high Christology.”

(The Christian doctrine about Jesus being a divine Messiah is an example of something that is “high Christology.”)

Having read through Wright’s massive work, I find that Wax makes a spot-on observation.

In Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Wright gives close attention to the idea that a high Christology already existed in the fledgling Christian church even prior to Paul ever putting pen to parchment. Here is how Wright puts it:

If Paul must have been aware that he was reaffirming the classic Jewish monotheism of his day, he must equally have been aware of the fact that he had redrawn this monotheism quite dramatically around Jesus himself….¹

Did Judaism have any beliefs, stories, ideas about God himself upon which they might have drawn to say what they now wanted to say about Jesus?

The answer is: yes, they did…Central to second-Temple monotheism was the belief…that Israel’s God, having abandoned Jerusalem and the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile, would one day return. He would return in person. He would return in glory. He would return to judge and save. He would return to bring about the new exodus, overthrowing the enemies that had enslaved his people. He would return to establish his glorious, tabernacling, presence in their midst. He would return to rule over the whole world. He would come back to be king. This act, still in the future from the perspective of the pre-Christian Jews, was a vital part of what they believed about ‘divine identity.’ And this is the part that best explains not only Paul’s view of Jesus but also that of the entire early church. The long-awaited return of yhwh to Zion is, I suggest, the hidden clue to the origin of Christology.

Devout Jews Longed for that return. They saw it prophesied across the scriptures, and they prayed for its coming. Some such people, seeing the events concerning Jesus, deduced that it had happened. This is what, to their great surprise, it would look like when Israel’s God returned to reign…Long before Paul dictated his first letter; long before the ‘pre-Pauline’ material, if such there was, took shape in the early worshipping community; before, even, the risen Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, the early Christians believed that Israel’s one God had returned in person. In the person of Jesus. The evidence for this proposal is found all over the New Testament….²

Jesus’ first followers found themselves not only (as it were) permitted to use God-language for Jesus, but compelled to use Jesus-language for the one God.

All this, as I say, seems to have taken place before Paul ever put pen to paper. But it is in his letters that it emerges as already fully formed. It explodes into life, claiming to the newly revealed form of ancient Jewish monotheism.³

Stories about the historical Jesus being ordinary human, albeit a very spiritually and intellectually enlightened one at that, but after he died his followers gradually began to create myths about him being a cosmic deity, all such stories are nonsense. When Paul makes statements about the divinity of Christ, as in the cases of Philippians 2:5-11, Colossians 1:15-20, and Titus 2:11-14, he is drawing from what Christians had already believed about the Lord. In fact, first century Jews were expecting Yahweh to return to them in glory, and their expectations were fulfilled in Christ.

When Christians talk of Jesus being fully divine and fully human in one person this is far from some mythological development of the man who lived in history; rather, they are holding on to a belief that was around from the very beginning of Christianity. God is with us. The way to the one true God of the universe is Jesus Christ.

— WGN

1. N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 644.
2. Ibid., 653-654.
3. Ibid., 655.