Abraham and Sarah have a firstborn covenant son they name Isaac.
Isaac and Rebekah have a firstborn covenant son they name Jacob.
Jacob’s wives bring forth twelve sons. Jacob’s name is changed to Israel. Then, oddly—or not so oddly within the overarching narrative—Jacob’s twelve sons and all their children become known corporately by the covenant name of their father, Israel. God now has a corporate people, a nation. Israel then goes into Egypt and becomes an enslaved people. God eventually sends Moses to deliver Israel from Egyptian bondage, and—pay attention now—God instructs him to tell Pharaoh something rather specific:
Israel is My son, My firstborn. So I say to you, let My son go that he may serve Me. Exodus 4:22-23
Israel, the nation, is now designated as God’s “firstborn son,” singular. At this point in the story, the progeny language initiated in Genesis 3:15 takes on an expanded application of corporate Sonship with regards to Israel as a nation. In what sense is Israel God’s firstborn son? The answer is evident when we recall the promise to Abraham:
In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Genesis 12:3
Israel is God’s firstborn nation-son with the intent that, through the witness of Israel, many other nations will become nation-sons of God, as well. Again, we see that the position or role of the “firstborn son” has nothing to do with birth order. It has to do with the conveyance of the covenant to all the nations of the earth. Israel is the spiritual channel through which God intends to incorporate all nations into the Sonship status that was lost by Adam. Isaac, Jacob, and then Israel, were all “firstborn” in a positional sense or in a functional sense, not in a chronological sense.
It is at this point in the biblical narrative—when Israel is designated as God’s firstborn son—that God assumes the role of “Father” in relation to Israel. Rebuking Israel for their unfaithfulness to God, Moses said,
Is He not your Father, who bought you?
Has He not made you and established you? . . .
They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods;
With abominations they provoked Him to anger.
They sacrificed to demons, not to God,
To gods they did not know,
To new gods, new arrivals,
That your fathers did not fear.
Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful,
And have forgotten the God who fathered you. Deuteronomy 32:6, 16-18
Moses tells Israel:
God is “your Father.”
God “begot you.”
God “fathered you.”
Now, with Israel taking on the role of God’s only begotten son among the nations, God takes on the role of Father to Israel. For the first time in the biblical narrative, God now employs the language of birthing. He “begot” Israel as His chosen people among the nations. Israel, as God’s only begotten son among the nations, is chastised because he has “forgotten the God who fathered” him, a fathering and birthing that occurred when God delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage. Israel was turning to the “gods” of the other nations and thus denying the God who fathered him. As God would later say through Jeremiah, “I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn” (Jeremiah 31:9). The other nations are under the authority of their demon gods (Deuteronomy 32:17), but Israel is God’s chosen people, called out from among the nations to be God’s only begotten son, through whom all the other nations will be blessed.
As with the Sonship 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.
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