role, the fatherhood of God is grounded in the Old Testament narrative and is tightly connected with Israel’s calling as the people through which the Messiah will enter the world. If we want to understand what the New Testament means when it calls God “Father,” we must allow the story itself to tell us what it means. When we do that—when we think in theological obedience to the narrative of the Bible—it becomes evident that there is a sense in which God is our Father and the Father of Jesus, and there is a sense in which God cannot ultimately be confined to fatherhood, which we will explore later in this study.
A consistent picture is building as we simply follow the biblical narrative where it leads. We’re on the edge of our seats at this point as the implications of Sonship begin to form in our minds. By letting the story itself guide us, we are about to understand the Bible on a whole new level. It only gets more astounding from here, so watch, ever so carefully, what happens next.
“There’s Adam, and there’s Jesus. And these two figures constitute the premise of the entire biblical story.”
Chapter Five
DAVID, MY SON
Israel, God’s “firstborn son,” now liberated from bondage, grows as a nation, generation after generation, until a boy named David is born.
You may have heard David’s story as an isolated inspirational tale with cute lessons about conquering personal “giants” that stand against your professional success (Goliath) with your five personality strengths (your five smooth stones), but it’s more than that. David’s story is, quite profoundly, the seamless continuation of the Bible’s big covenant narrative.
David is, in fact, the next son of God in Scripture’s Sonship saga.
He becomes the chosen king of Israel and, in him, Israel’s corporate identity is now represented. The Sonship identity now takes on a more detailed prophetic significance. The birth order ideal is upset, yet again, because David is not the firstborn son of his father, Jesse, but rather the last-born (1 Samuel 16:10-11).
Again, it is the historical continuance of the covenant that matters, not chronological birth order. With David God reaffirms the covenant promise He made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel, and David then becomes an expanded prototype of the coming Messiah.
Watch this.
In order to convey the idea of succession, Scripture again invokes the language of “son.” In Psalm 2:1-7, David sings of himself being “begotten” as God’s “son,” while simultaneously singing prophetically of the coming Messiah, in whom all God has promised to the world through Israel will be fulfilled:
Why do the nations rage,
and the people plot a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against His Anointed (Messiah in Hebrew) . . .
Yet I have set My King on My holy hill of Zion.
I will declare the decree: the Lord has said to Me,
“You are My Son, today I have begotten You.”
Who is David singing about?
Well, he is singing about himself in the immediate, local historical sense. David is the anointed king of Israel. But he is also singing prophetically about the ultimate, universal anointed king of Israel, namely Jesus Christ. We know this to be the case because the New Testament makes this prophetic connection (Acts 2:25-36; 4:25-28; 13:33; Hebrews 1:5).
In Psalm 89:19-29, David portrays himself as God’s “firstborn” son through whom His “covenant shall stand firm,” while again foretelling the coming of the Messiah:
Then You spoke in a vision to Your holy one,
And said: “I have given help to one who is mighty;
I have exalted one chosen from the people.
“I have found My servant David;
With My holy oil I have anointed him,
With whom My hand shall be established;
Also My arm shall strengthen him.
“The enemy shall not outwit him,
Nor the son of wickedness afflict him.
“I will beat down his foes before his face,
And plague those who hate him.
“But My faithfulness and My mercy shall be with him,
And in My name his horn shall be exalted.
“Also I will set his hand over the sea,
And his right hand over the rivers.
“He shall cry to Me, ‘You are my Father,
My God, and the rock of my salvation.’
“Also I will make him My firstborn,
The highest of the kings of the earth.
“My mercy I will keep for him forever,
And My covenant shall stand firm with him.
“His seed also I will make to endure forever,
And his throne as the days of heaven.”
Again, we naturally ask, of whom is David singing?
Who is the holy one?
Who is the exalted one chosen from the people?
Who is the one who cries out, “You are my Father,” to whom God responds, “I will make him My firstborn”?
Who is the highest king of the earth, in whom God’s covenant will be established forever?
David, of course, and yet more than David!
At this point in our journey, knowing what we know, simply reading these two Psalms of David should flip a light on in our minds. These Old Testament passages are vital for grasping the story as it continues into the New Testament, specifically regarding what the New Testament means when it calls Jesus God’s “firstborn son” and God’s “only begotten son.” These psalms of David are the origin of the terminology, along with the earlier passages we’ve noted regarding Israel’s Sonship. In fact, as we will discover, the New Testament specifically quotes these two Psalms to inform us of the covenant identity of the Messiah.
Therefore—and this is crucial—it is here in the Old Testament narrative that we need to look to interpret the terminology of Sonship when we encounter it in the New Testament.
And we will do just that, shortly.
For now, we simply need to notice, in the interest of our future enlightenment, that David portrays himself, as well as the coming Messiah, as “begotten” by God and as God’s “firstborn son,” not in a literal chronological sense, but in a positional, narrative
