The Second Part of “Christ fulfills the law.”
The Land of Israel is intimately connected with the tabernacle system. If you pay attention to where men offered sacrifices in the scriptures after the time of Abraham, it is consistently in the land of Israel. The land is special and holy to God. God commands Israel in Deuteronomy to set up two stones and write the law on them, then set them up on Mt. Ebal in the holy land. These were witnesses between the land and the people of Israel. The Israelites are told in Leviticus 18 that if they sin against God the land would vomit them out. The land turns against Israel when she sins through famine and through infertility. If God is going to dwell in the land it must remain holy.
The role of the land in the Old Testament helps us to understand Holy War in the Old Testament. The Canaanites had thoroughly defiled the land, so God used the Israelites as a judgment against them. The role of the land also helps us understand why so many sins received capital punishment, especially the reason why idolaters received capital punishment. If the land was defiled it brought judgment on the whole nation of Israel. We can think of the sin of Achin and how that affected the entire Israelite community when they attacked Ai. Achin’s sin had defiled the camp. The sin of the people defiled the land of Israel. The land had to remain pure because God desired to dwell among his people.
To understand Christ’s fulfillment of the land, we need to understand what the kingdom of God is and further on, the church.
Christ comes to inaugurate the kingdom of God. This is Christ’s opening announcement in the gospels. The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom. We can see it visibly in members of the church of Christ, laboring in whatever position God has called them too. But the kingdom is also invisible. In fact, it is primarily invisible. It is the work of the Spirit in transforming the hearts of the regenerate so that they love and serve their king. As Christ says to his disciples in Luke 17: 21, “Nor will they say, “look here it is,” or “it’s over there!” for the kingdom of God is already among you.
In the Old Testament, that kingdom had definite boundaries. In the New Testament, that kingdom is wherever believers are. Our king is Christ. Christ is the anchor that keeps us rooted from above. Christ is the ark according to 1 Peter 3, who keeps us safe in the troubled waters of our own day. We are citizens of heaven. We cannot defile the land in the same way. There remains a promise that the saints will inherit the earth, but our orientation to the land is different. God bound the Jews to the land and the purity of the land. God binds us together by the Spirit of Christ, as the church of God, to Christ’s body in heaven.
The Jews furthered the kingdom of Israel through obedience to God’s call to holiness so that the nations would be blessed by her. Christians further the kingdom of God by calling all the people of the earth to become citizens of the kingdom of heaven.
We also need to understand what the church is in order to understand how Christ fulfilled the role of the land. The church is the gathering of the citizens of the kingdom so that they may worship God. The Greek word for church is a political word, referring to a gathering of citizens in order to make decisions for a city. The church gathers in Christ. They come as men and women born of the spirit of Christ. The purity of the church depends on the purity of her members.
Once again we can ask how the church is to order her life according to God’s law in the Old Testament. This time his word about the land. The church is called to purity through the use of church discipline. The church is the gathering of a spiritual kingdom. That means that she doesn’t use the sword to punish her offending members as they did in the Old Testament.
Rather the church uses spiritual means. She guards the purity of the church through the preaching of the word. There is a possibility he may have to remove members from the fellowship at the Lord’s Table. She needs to remove those members of Christ, not from the land. This is how the church keeps herself pure. If she does not, it’s not the land that vomits her out, but God. Think of Revelation 3: 15, where God threatens to vomit out the church of Laodicea if she does not repent.
At the same time, the promise to the church is that she will inherit the earth. God calls the church to wage a spiritual holy war against the lies of this world. We heard that this. She is called to do this in her own midst in order to protect her people. God also calls her to apply the redemptive work of Christ in rescuing people from the lies of the devil. Just as the church is the temple of Christ, so the church is the land of Christ, where people can be safe from the wrath of God.